TV presenter Adrian Chiles opens up about his difficult relationship with alcohol ahead of appearance in Ilkley

“At the time, one of the show’s I did was late Thursday night, so obviously I wouldn’t drink on those nights, but every other day of that week I’d have a drink. And I couldn’t remember the last day that I didn’t have a drink, apart from those Thursday nights. I thought there’s something wrong here.”

If it wasn’t for his BBC documentary, he says he would still in all probability be drinking 100 units a week.

“Some days I’d stay in the pub and just carried on drinking with impunity. And I could. Outwardly, it wasn’t really affecting me. I didn’t get hangovers; I could still keep going.”

In the documentary, a doctor flagged signs of potential liver damage. It was sobering. He now drinks on average 20 to 30 units a week, achieved in the same way someone would count calories at Weightwatchers, by counting units, and carefully planning each drink.

The fact he cut down so easily suggests his drink problem wasn’t that bad?

“People think or say if you have managed to cut down, you can’t have had much of a problem in the first place. Or they think, you’re still in the grip of alcohol; you’re kidding yourself. Both are annoying because neither is necessarily true.” Chiles believes there’s a middle ground for drinkers.

“For many people who really do need to seek help, they don’t, precisely because they’re frightened their doctor is going to say, ‘hey you’ve going to have to stop drinking completely’. I think that’s a big problem.”

The majority of people he thinks, do drink within the guidelines, it’s just people who drink heavily normalise their behaviour.

The Good Drinker: How I Learned to Love Drinking Less is his new book, which he’ll be discussing at the Ilkley Literature Festival on Saturday 15 October at King’s Hall. It is a memoir and a manifesto.

Drink Aware states 48 per cent of adults drink alcohol at least once a week; 20 per cent don’t drink at all while 15 per cent of adults binge drink.

“The problem is, drinkers like me surround ourselves with other drinkers. So, we think everybody drinks too much. We’re only choosing to see the other drinkers. It doesn’t mean everybody is doing it.”

The book began, he said, as a self-help book, but turned into memoir.

“It’s dodgy territory when you’re a journalist and journalistically examine yourself, but I got quite interested in the facts and the figure and the misconceptions about alcohol, about drinking, about our relationship with alcohol, and my particular relationship with alcohol.”

For Chiles, it is about redefining that relationship. A chapter in the book is called ‘Beige’, after a friend said the world was very beige after she gave up drinking.

“I thought, I feel like that. How dare I feel like that? I was sat in a park at the time and the sky was blue and the field green and I thought am I really saying that God’s green earth is beige if I haven’t got a drink inside me? It really pulled me up short. I thought, I’m not having that, I’m just not having it.” Chiles is known for his light-natured and humoured writing style in his regular Guardian columns.

“I don’t think you ever change anything by being completely serious,” he says about the tone of the new book. “So yes, I suppose there’s a lightness of touch, but it became more serious in content. The more I looked into it, the more I realised my whole life revolved around drink. I just find it upsetting really looking back as a teenager, in my twenties and thirties, how everything sort of revolved around drinking one way or another; you meet a mate for a drink, you have a good day you go for a drink, you have a bad day you go for a drink.”

Advocating drink to drinkers – albeit in moderation – sounds like a slippery slope. Chiles says he takes the responsibility seriously. He talked to alcoholics, “who can’t touch a drop or it will wreck their lives” for the book.

“The basic premise of the book is a lot of people who drink a lot think well, I’m not an alcoholic, I haven’t got a problem because I don’t fall over drunk, there’s no ambulances in my life… I think this idea of alcoholism as a disease that you either have or haven’t got is dangerous, because we can all convince ourselves that we haven’t got it. If you’re drinking a lot, that’s too much, and that will have an absolutely negative effect on you.”

His social circle over the years has been built, ‘rightly or wrongly’, around drinking. “It’s quite difficult to extradite yourself from that without the baby going out with the bath water,” he says.

“The point is you can drink less and actually enjoy it more. There’s no doubt of that in my mind. I quote Paul Cook in the book, the drummer in the Sex Pistols who is a friend of mine. I remember him asking after my documentary came out, if I thought he drank too much. He has a couple of pints in the pub. I said, I think you are alright mate, you were probably addicted to heroin back in the day, weren’t you? He said he was. I said, how did you get off it? And he said, I don’t know I just did. When I’m 80, I still want to go for a quiet pint in a pub. I still want access to that. I don’t want to wreck myself so much that I can’t touch a drop by then.” Moderating he says is in some respects more difficult than abstaining.

“I’ve spoken to a famous actress called Finty Williams who is Judi Dench’s daughter about this. She was going out to celebrate three years of sobriety. I thought that’s great, well done, but there’s no anniversary of moderation. It’s always a work in progress. If you are moderating, then you’re planning ahead –you’re thinking how much do I drink? When do I stop drinking? Who do I drink with, who do I don’t drink with? It’s exhausting. There’s no end to it. And your efforts are not really celebrated.” But you will, he said still spot him in a pub in York. He’s often in and around Yorkshire, where he has family, and recently got married at Jervaulx Abbey. His best mate lives near Wetherby. Since moderating, his depression and anxiety has improved. He’s also thinking about getting round to his lifelong ambition of writing a novel.

“The idea of writing something that someone else is absorbed by I just think is the greatest thing ever.”

He feels if sobriety suits someone, great, but “it’s also valid to just drink less.”

“You don’t have to stop completely and you don’t have to go the other way and get lost in it; there is a third way. I’m thankful for the beauty in the world. But then, I’m also thankful I can have a pint of Guinness, have a chat with someone and then just go home, and I’ve gotten to the stage where I can just do that.”

Adrian Chiles is at the Ilkley Literature Festival on Saturday October 15 https://www.ilkleyliteraturefestival.org.uk