From a top TV newsreader to DRUNK IN THE GUTTER
He lost his family, his house, his job and ended up sleeping on the street. Now, in a new book ED MITCHELL tells, with searing candour, the tragic story of how alcohol destroyed his life ...and why he’ll never be safe from the bottle
I’VE been wrestling with alcohol for more than half a century. Sometimes I’m on top, other times I’m flat on my back, firmly in its grip. Exhausting though the struggle is, I keep getting back in the ring. It didn’t start as a fight. Quite the opposite — it was love at first taste. That first sip of cider at the age of 16 felt instantly right, filling my brain and limbs with warmth, excitement and euphoria. It’s a feeling I’ve been trying to recapture ever since.
I became confident and at ease with other people. For an introverted teenager, this was miraculous.
Good times became so closely tied to drinking that fun times could not be had without it.
This drink/fun connection translated seamlessly to life at university, but it had other advantages, too. My homesickness, my state-school inferiority and the need to fit in could all be alleviated by consuming gallons of beer.
There was not a hint of it being a problem. Why would it be? All the in-crowd drank. Good blokes played hard, worked hard, got the good degrees — and the girls. Those were the best days of my life.
Then I went straight into Fleet Street as a graduate trainee with Reuters. Having a close relationship with alcohol fitted in perfectly with the atmosphere and ethos of Fleet Street, which, in the 1970s, was still home to all the main newspapers. The mantra was: ‘Get the story, get it first, get it right, get the drinks in.’
To me, an enthusiastic, impressionable 22-year-old, the best journalists displayed a worldly attitude, met their contacts in bars and operated well while intoxicated.
I moved to the BBC for the next ten years, but I never felt entirely comfortable broadcasting until I’d had a few drinks. Getting just the right balance between cool confidence and slurring gibberish was always key. Occasionally I was getting that important calculation wrong and it was noticed.
By this stage I had a wife, two children and a large mortgage and was commuting by train from the south coast to London five days a week. My way of handling these demands was by self-medicating through alcohol.
Drinking had now evolved from good fun to something darker. I was using it to control my mood; life without alcohol was grey and flat. I was chasing after the sunshine of my youth, but I had to drink more and more to return to that happy place.
I didn’t think I had a problem, but I got a harsh reality check at the end of 1999 when I was sacked from my £90,000-a-year job for an alcohol-related incident.
I mention my salary because it had sustained a high level of easily available credit. On zero income the house of plastic cards came tumbling down.
I floundered around for the next six years, taking on any job, at any pay, to keep the family ship sailing. It meant more debt, paying one credit card with another (I had 25) and using loans to cover the mortgage. My income barely paid the interest on only one of the cards.
Throughout this time I was keeping our perilous finances and my alcohol dependency a secret — or thought I was. My wife and I had been together for 25 years and she’d witnessed how drinking had gradually got a terrible hold on me. She tried to intervene, but all attempts failed.
In a lucid moment, I revealed the calamitous state of our finances. Bankruptcy was the only way out.
THESE were agonising times: divorce came first, then the family house was sold and the mortgage paid off. By mid-2006, I found myself with no family, no house, nowhere to live, no possessions, no car, no income and no idea of what would happen next.
After a period of sofa-surfing and brief stays at council shelters, I was left with one option: sleeping on the streets. Following several painful early mistakes, I found what seemed like a safe park bench behind a nightclub on Hove seafront. There were half a dozen of us street sleepers (many of them former soldiers), so that gave some security, even camaraderie.
The long, mostly sleepless nights on that bench provided plenty of time to reflect on my rapid fall from family man and successful broadcaster, who had interviewed presidents, prime ministers and CEOs, to a tramp whose possessions were contained in a rucksack.
There was no one to blame, nor did I want to. I could see how I was responsible, however tempting it was to slip into victimhood.
Rough sleeping is quite simply awful, painful and exhausting. It’s also virtually impossible to get out of. To the local authority, a male between 18 and 65 (I was 54) who is not mentally or physically disabled is ‘non-priority’. Not having an address (often associated with being homeless!) presented yet another problem: a catch-22. Homelessness was also profoundly embarrassing. I did everything I could to stay clean and not sink into the stereotypical image of a dosser, but it involved some tough physical challenges. I remember one night in driving rain on ‘my’ bench. Soaked through, I resorted to my liquid comfort, a quarter bottle of vodka. Disastrously, it slipped through my cold, wet fingers and smashed on the pavement — bad enough, but made worse when I tried to clear the broken glass and found it immersed in dog excrement.
The only people who knew of my existence were charity workers visiting at night with coffee, sandwiches and the Word of the Lord. I was just glad of their kindness, the food and the company.
One of my nocturnal visitors was a local journalist who recognised me. It was just ten days to Christmas and he thought my plight would make a good story — richesto-rags, no room at the inn, homeless at Yuletide.
I had nothing left to lose so, oiled by a few free beers, I was interviewed and photographed. The story swiftly spread to the national newspapers, radio, TV and even internationally.
The public exposure of my destitution was uncomfortable, but I had run out of options to extricate myself from the hole I was in. As an added bonus, wads of cash were being thrust into my
hand by various media people; I used it to upgrade from cheap cider to something stronger.
Then a documentary maker contacted me. That half-hour programme, Saving Ed Mitchell (the title made me cringe), was viewed by more than five million people.
The media attention resulted in a book deal, From Headlines To Hard Times.
But perhaps the greatest outcome was that I was offered the chance to go on a 28-day rehabilitation programme at the Priory in London.
It’s an upmarket sort of place set in its own leafy grounds and attended by many high-profile (socalled) celebrities. A month’s stay costs five figures. I was exhausted, had lost a lot of weight and was simply glad of a comfortable bed, three good meals a day and the opportunity to tackle my alcohol dependence. It was a while, in the endless hours of group therapy, before I could say out loud that I was an alcoholic.
Apart from it being true, this admission seemed to be the only way to make progress in a regime based on the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous.
I relaxed into the fellowship of the gatherings, but I never thought AA was going to be for me. I did, however, appreciate its underlying philosophical roots and that it has worked for thousands over the past eight decades.
Abstinence lasted for a couple of years before thoughts began to creep in that I could probably handle a drink. The first mouthful was like getting in touch with an old friend and being transported to that youthful feeling of euphoria. But this state of mind needed topping up with further doses; as they say in AA (they are fond of aphorisms): ‘One is too many and a thousand is never enough.’
SOON, I was back in that firm, craving grip; a rapid return to round-the-clock drinking. Then my mother died, which impacted me in ways I was not fully aware of at the time — or even am today.
By then I was working on three demanding month-long contracts training TV presenters for new broadcast companies overseas. The result was an alcohol crisis and a return to rehab. The therapy regime this time was a lot tougher than at the Priory, more like a boot camp. I stuck the course and stayed on the rails for a year or so, but then the old brain patterns re-emerged.
Over the last ten years, since my escape from the park bench, the main driving force has been simply to keep going.
Life is worth living — on balance. I do actually want to see what happens next. And this is a point I want to emphasise: I am alive because I just have to keep putting one foot in front of the other. I must cling on.
It also helps to have someone close and important in my life. I got to know Mandy in the darkest days of rough sleeping, when she brought me coffee and soup. An enthusiastic drinker herself at that time, she gave up completely when I went into the Priory. We married a few years later.
Without alcohol running through my system, drinking actually has little attraction. I can walk through the stacked alcohol aisles of local supermarkets without the urge to fill my trolley. Indeed, our road has six outlets for alcohol, but I don’t use them. Booze is everywhere and I accept its existence; it’s never going away. The trouble comes when the ‘other’ me begins to argue it’s safe to revisit my old friend. His case goes something like this: ‘Look how well you feel. You could feel even better with just one drink. It’ll be like the old times when you were young and life was filled with opportunity and excitement. Go on! What harm will one drink do? Don’t be a bore!’
This madness will be hard for non-alcoholics to understand: ‘Why not just stop? Snap out of it! Get a grip!’ But it’s just not that simple. The compulsion to drink comes in very subtle, beguiling, convincing forms.
Even though I know their siren song, I can still become wrecked on the rocks.
In the beginning, of course, decades ago, it felt like a choice to drink; there appeared to be the possibility of exercising free will. But the habit of drinking slowly carves deep neural pathways — ruts that become hard to escape.
Intriguingly though, in my case, the compulsion to consume alcohol can fade for no apparent reason. The inner voices urging me to drink are stilled. Serenity reigns and I am comfortable in my own skin. Blessed are these moments.
I have tried to pin down what causes this. Is it hormonal changes? Something to do with nutrition? Sleep patterns? Phases of the moon? Solar activity? Whatever it is, I am grateful — until the next storm front arrives. That’s when I have learned to batten down the hatches, hide myself away, let the alcohol get me through without too much damage and get off it again as soon as possible.
WHAT has kept me going through more than 50 years of drinking is — at least in the later decades — awareness of the problem, a desire to live, sheer brute stubbornness, a great deal of reading on the subject (books have saved the day) and a focus on developing a personal philosophy.
That philosophy, a work in progress, is a patchwork of threads selected from a sewing box of ideas, mostly ancient. It’s an enduring attempt to create personal meaning.
At the heart of it lies stoicism, which can be summed up in the Serenity Prayer that we all had to learn in rehab: ‘Grant us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change, the courage to change the things we can and the wisdom to know the difference.’
In other words, the only aspect of life you can really control is your reaction to events and people.
This search for meaning and some sort of workable answers to the mystery of existence is, for me, a key part of ‘keeping going’. Not being p***ed all the time makes this quest that much easier.
The most fortunate escape was getting out of permanent homelessness. Only my past as someone recognisable from TV got me out of that deep ditch. Most of those I slept alongside a decade ago are dead.
Good luck rescued me — but responding to that luck played its part, too.
I began this piece by using wrestling as a metaphor for my long relationship with alcohol. But I’ve no willpower to wrestle any more. Over the decades the battle has evolved into acceptance and, with it, I have realised I am not my opponent, and that life — what remains of it — is there to be embraced.
O EXTRACTED from What Doesn’t Kill You: Fifteen Stories Of Survival, edited by Elitsa Dermendzhiyska, published by Unbound at €11. © Ed Mitchell 2020. Available from amazon.