Adrian Chiles, author, broadcaster, columnist, and for these purposes, longtime dispenser of searching but practical thoughts on booze, met comedian John Robins when they were making adjacent shows on Radio 5 Live. After Chiles made his documentary, Drinkers Like Me, at the start of 2021, the pair got talking.
Robins – whose new comedy show Howl explores his relationship with alcohol and his journey into sobriety – was experimenting with drinking in moderation; Chiles was writing his book, The Good Drinker: How I Learned to Love Drinking Less. Adrian interviews John in the hardback, and they’re both enthusiastic, freshly minted moderate drinkers. By the time the paperback was coming out, though, John was teetotal. What follows is the conversation they had about how their paths crossed and, later, branched apart.
Adrian Chiles: What I’d realised, writing the book, is that there are people working out there who talk about harm reduction. They don’t talk like therapists. They don’t say: “We need to get to the inner cause of your drinking.” They say: “Whatever it takes to get your consumption down.” But I’m absolutely clear that moderation isn’t for everybody; that abstinence may be the simplest way for some people, or the only way.
John Robins: I think my ears pricked up when you talked about moderation, because it was my obsession, for six years. I was a daily drinker before, and in 2017 I started to monitor my drinking, literally with spreadsheets. I was very pleased with this. Over those years, I was drinking, on average, less and less each year. However, I was always drinking the same amount when I drank. So what I realised, looking back, is I was actually getting madder and madder and madder. By moderating, I became even more obsessed with alcohol. I was buying a few years for my body, but in my mind, I was insane.
AC: I think people are led to believe that moderation isn’t possible: that if you successfully moderate, it’s because you didn’t have much of a problem in the first place. Otherwise, the ideas are very binary. People will stop you in the street and say: “I hear you’re on the wagon,” or: “Are you a friend of Bill’s?” or: “Are you still off the booze?” It doesn’t even occur to people that there could be a middle ground, either you’re completely befuddled and drunk the whole time, or you’re completely sober.
JR: The difference between us is that you’re moderating to change a habit. Whereas I was, unbeknownst to me, moderating to try to control an addiction. You describe alcohol as a handrail. I would say alcohol was the handrail, the stairs and the destination.
AC: Sometimes I do still feel as though it’s more than just a handrail; maybe a handrail and half the stairs.
JR: At the heart of this is one of the useful definitions of an alcoholic as opposed to a heavy drinker. When you take the first drink, are you able to limit your drinking from that point onwards? You talk about drinking two pints of Stella mixed with spring water as part of your moderation. That would be absolutely impossible for me to do, because once I have one drink, I then drink to exactly the same point every time.
AC: I just happen to have an off-switch with drinking, in a way that I don’t have with food. Left to my own devices, I can eat myself to an absolute standstill. But I wouldn’t give myself that get-out, because I’ve got, probably, a less good on-switch than you. Anything can get me to start drinking. If you’ve got an easily triggered on-switch, and no off-switch, then you really have got a problem.
JR: If you go online and ask: “Am I an alcoholic?” you get these long questionnaires: has alcohol ever affected your work life? Have you ever missed work due to alcohol? Has your family ever worried about your drinking? The questions are ridiculous because they are so broad. There’s not anyone who has ever been drunk, who wouldn’t be able to go, “Yeah, I lost a day to a hangover. Yes, it’s affected my mental health.” And, in some ways it doesn’t matter; your liver doesn’t care if you’re an alcoholic or a heavy drinker. But the real difference between us is that if we went to the pub and had two pints and then went home, you would be fine, and I would be in hell. Because I’d turned the machine on, the machine would want me to keep on going.
AC: Even if you take it that alcoholism exists, and there is such a thing as an alcoholic – and clinically, my understanding is that it doesn’t really exist, but I’ve stopped arguing against it – my issue has always been that if you can stop, then you drink with impunity. That was very damaging to me, because it meant that I could go on drinking 100 units a week, thinking that was fine.
JR: Well it does exist dear, you’re sat across from one, but I guess you’re saying the fact that you could say to yourself that you weren’t an alcoholic gave you permission to continue drinking to that level?
AC: 100%. And I think that is true for an awful lot of heavy drinkers.
JR: I don’t think there’s any way, if you’re drinking 100 units a week, you can call that moderate drinking.
AC: Let me explain what I mean: I had no idea until I made that documentary. I was horrified. The first day filming, West Brom were playing and it was a lunchtime kick- off. So I was in the pub at 10am, and I drank four pints. That afternoon, nothing. Fortieth birthday in the evening, had a couple of pints, obligatory prosecco, half a bottle of wine, another couple of pints. I only added it up the following day – it was 36 units. And it didn’t feel like a big drinking day to me.
JR: I think that ties in to the lack of information; so, if you’re drinking 100 units a week, you’re going to die pretty young. There are no people in their 80s drinking 100 units a week. As someone who has drunk that much for long periods of time, it’s two bottles of wine a night. It’s a lot.
AC: I’ve probably got down to between 20 and 30 a week, which is still too much, but it’s a third of what I was drinking. Public health rarely talks about the harm curve. It recommends 14 units, but the problem with that is, big drinkers look at it and think: ridiculous. In the way it’s sold to you from a public health perspective, you either get down to 14 units, or you’re at risk. Which is kind of true, but it is also true that if you go from 50 units to 40 units, you are relatively doing yourself more good than if you go from 20 units to 10 units. And you can still moderate by drinking nothing at all most days, then absolutely going for it.
JR: The fact that you can drink those pints in the morning and then stop means that, ironically, you’ll have drunk more than I would have done. Because I would have drunk until three in the afternoon and then passed out.
AC: If you meet a friend for a couple of pints, a couple of nights a week, throw in a day out at the football, plus a couple of nights out, a long lunch on Sunday, you’re getting towards 100 units really bloody quickly. Particularly if you’re not passing out, you’re not waking up in a skip, you’re not pissing the bed, you’re not drinking Pernod in the morning – you slip in under the radar.
JR: I just want to be very clear: I’m not anti-moderation. I’m just saying that for an alcoholic, it might make things mentally worse for them and for those around them. The analogy I’d use is a 40-a-day smoker. Give them two cigarettes a day, they will be much worse company. If I was stranded on a desert island and there was one can of Guinness on there, it would still be there the day I was rescued. Because the idea of drinking one can would be horrible, I would be in such a state.
AC: Something you said that really resonated with me, and actually made a difference to my moderation, was when you said that when you’re not drinking, you’ve got to make an extra effort with people, to be funny, and charming. I thought drinking was absolutely essential to have a good time. If you’re using that word, “essential”, you’ve got to have a look at your relationship with alcohol. In the past, you could have filled a room with all my favourite people in the world, and if I wasn’t allowed to drink, I wouldn’t really be looking forward to seeing them.
JR: I would get to a wedding where they would greet you with a glass of prosecco, and I would immediately be in a bad mood. It’s midday – I don’t want to start with prosecco. Is there a bar? No, not til four. Four hours of prosecco.
AC: I wasn’t that bad.
JR: I look back now and think: Fuck me, man. No one else there was thinking about that. But that’s all I was thinking – mad, selfish, self-seeking, arrogant, proud, intolerant, impatient behaviour. And now that I’ve taken the alcohol out of the equation, I’m trying to undo that in my life, because I still have those character traits left over from booze.
AC: There’s a therapist I interviewed for my book, and one of the things she does is go through each drink of an evening, and marks what benefit you get from it. I really came to understand – the only real joy is in the first drink, that affords you a change of state. The second drink, and every subsequent drink you have, is a vain attempt to recreate the feeling that first drink gave you. And I found that helpful. But, what if you’re drinking for oblivion? If you’re drinking for oblivion, obviously, moderation isn’t going to work.
JR: If I could drink 36 units a week without it driving me to the edge of sanity, I would do that. But I can’t. A really important part of accepting my alcoholism was understanding I can never drink like that. I will never be a “normal” drinker.
AC: Moderation is complicated. It’s more complicated than stopping in the sense that everyone knows you’ve stopped. There is no more decision-making. I’ve got 100 decisions to make all the time. I’m not looking for pity here, but I have to decide now, what will I drink tonight?
JR: The night I stopped, what followed was really hard, traumatic work. But that first feeling was complete relief. It was like I’d stepped out of the boxing ring. That relief, I never have to think about whether I can drink again, because I’ve decided not to.
AC: When you’re doing your standup, how much of the audience is under the influence? Because it’s quite a big thing with comedy.
JR: I would say the majority. In Edinburgh, I used to time myself, how fast I could get off stage and into the pub. The record was six minutes. My audience would come in, talking about my show, to see me with a finished pint, and they would look at me as if it was a magic trick. Like I was Derren Brown.
AC: And now you must talk, to some extent, about sobriety – presumably there’s not a lot of comedy in lecturing people. So how do you deal with that?
JR: I’ve got an hour of stuff I wrote when I was drinking, an hour I’ve written sober. And I had to go through the material that, in retrospect, I wrote when I was quite ill. And some of it – even stuff I really liked, it was funny – the self-pity in the material was, to me, now, so objectionable that I had to cut big chunks of stuff. Getting the balance between telling stories against myself when I was drinking, and telling stories about myself now I’m sober, without being either preachy or self-piteous, is tricky.
AC: I wish someone had told me – no, I’m blaming other people – I wish I’d been intelligent enough as a teenager to hear: alcohol is a drug, it is addictive, it can lead you into problems and, above all, it’s not the be-all and end-all. You can have a good time without drinking.
JR: I can’t think about parallel lives. It’s just too painful.
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John Robins is at the Edinburgh festival from 3 to 27 August, then touring. The Good Drinker by Adrian Chiles is out now (Profile, £14.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
In the UK, Action on Addiction is available on 0300 330 0659. In the US, SAMHSA’s National Helpline is at 800-662-4357. In Australia, the National Alcohol and Other Drug Hotline is at 1800 250 015; families and friends can seek help at Family Drug Support Australia at 1300 368 186
