Being a socially gregarious person last night I got in at 2am yesterday and having driven for an hour thought I’d unwind watching a documentary on BBC Iplayer before going to bed...
Adrian Chiles had been given an hour of screentime to address the issue of drinking too much. Adrian likes a drink and broke through the measly weekly limit of 14 units (reduced recently from 21 in case people have too much fun) virtually every day. All his friends did too as his life seemed to revolve around “working lunches” and watching football matches. I thought I used to drink a lot in my 30s but I was not in his league. He and his mates were terminally in denial of the dangers of their lifestyle despite the obvious warning signs - liver damage / water retention / expanding waist line.
Don’t know if that’s a pun but terminal was definitively the word as a man with a graph showed us the direct effects on life expectancy without putting any error bars on it or admitting there may be any other factors as health scientists are prone to do. Even if it were true it’s still possible to be a statistical outlier - as my GP explained once some people are more easily poisoned by alcohol than others. It was only a matter of time before the words “If alcohol was discovered today it would be banned,” were spoken by a medical potentate. And never were truer words spoken. An army of public health officials armed with non-invasive scanning techniques can now tell us with great surety that we will all die if we keep drinking… and show us all the evidence in real time as we do so…
A doctor rubbed some jelly on Adrian’s tummy, looked at his liver and tutted and mentioned scarring. Even the thought of cutting down to having some non-drinking days in his week seemed to turn Adrian to jelly … then again after years of 20-60 units a day he had arguably become a bit like a huge jelly already with the associated health risks.
Perhaps he was struggling with the existential pointlessness of a career in football punditry… did being paid very well to do something he enjoyed leave a hole in his life? Then I wondered if the hole was alcohol shaped… as I looked around his kitchen and tried to back calculate the cost of the installation. He seemed to have spent a lot on interior décor and I half wondered if he hadn’t made the documentary to show off his home. Perhaps he was hoping to sell it?
At one point he spoke cryptically about his problems dealing with employment insecurity and said something about being “kicked off” Breakfast television. At another point he met Frank Skinner who told him he wouldn’t tell him not to drink but to perhaps consider a period of abstinence and see how it went. Chiles looked like a child who’d been told to give up chocolate for lent. I read on his Wikipedia that he has now converted to Roman Catholicism (perhaps he caught it off Frank Skinner) and I had to wonder if he took communion under “both kinds”.
I noticed too on this page that he’d been sacked from covering the footy by ITV as well… And then I began to wonder did he all this drinking as he felt the need to schmooze to get on and he had to get drunk to relax himself around other people? Or had the booze had a detrimental effect on his career? Or was there a truth somewhere between these too. Was this a mea culpa to his own industry? He reminded me of Bob Monkhouse’s quote that “I’d drink less if God ever gave me a hangover”. God did indeed not give Bob a hangover – he did however give him prostate cancer and it is believed that over-consumption of the demon drink might relate to a greater risk …
...but then again the demon drink seems to be responsible for everything these days. Still he made 75 …not too bad. To cheer us Frank Skinner said at one point that his social life had “never recovered” from giving up booze and I didn’t think he was baiting Adrian.
Personally after some periods of complete abstinence followed by relapse followed by being told by my GP that my bad blood tests were probably a “false positive” but to “watch” it I think I am now actually drinking at the recommended 14 units a week (roughly) and I have to say I think my life has improved somewhat as a result. As to the effect on my social life fortunately there hasn’t been any because I never really had one anyway. But I sometimes wonder … if booze is as toxic as the public health officials keep telling us will it one day mean the end of pubs? They’re pretty much disappearing anyway … and what will we all do instead? Mr Silky once told me that the secret of understanding the comedy industry was just one fact – “we’re here to sell beer” and clearly the economics of most comedy clubs and indeed the Fridge Festival would go well up the spout should everybody suddenly abstain. Even if everybody just went down to 14 units I’m sure large sections of the economy would collapse to such an extent it’d make Brexit seem like a minor economic tremor…
So what’s the answer?
“’Go on have a drink’ that’s what they used to say to me,” said Frank Skinner before adding ominously, “but I didn’t.”
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