ME AND MY DRINKING

Alcohol, and how much of it we drink, is a touchy subject in this country. Elle Gordon asked some well-known people to talk to us honestly about their drinking habits. These brave souls tell us how much they imbibe, their favourite tipple, why they drink,

AL PORTER Comedian, writer and radio presenter

I would like to drink less than I do. I don’t think that I have a problem with alcohol because any time that I take long periods off drink, I don’t worry about it, and it’s certainly never affected my work. But I find that I take social drinking to quite an extreme level. I would drink every day and at the weekends. You could add a bottle of wine to that and add in some gin and add in some rum. I would be a real social drinker, absolutely.

I never drink before I go on stage because I think I was always warned against it. All the older comedians warned me: ‘Never get into the habit of drinking before you go on stage . . . we got into the habit of it and we all ended up with problems. It became a crutch.’ I never drink before I go on stage, except for maybe coffee and water, but after a show you’ve got this huge adrenalin high and there’s no way you could go home and watch Netflix.

After a gig, lots of the big shows have after-parties that could go until two in the morning. Or it might just be you and a few of the crew going next door for a drink. Even when you’re not gigging you get invited out to gigs, and of course you want to have a drink at that, or, especially in England, you want to meet someone who works in the BBC. Of course sometimes you could be at all these things and not drink.

I do get drunk. I haven’t been very messy drunk in ages, but when I was 19 or 20, I was.

I remember one time a taxi driver recognised me asleep in a field near my house and woke me up. I had obviously got close to the house and then given up and decided to have a kip in the field. He woke me up and said: ‘Maybe I should drive you home’. But that’s the last time I ever tried whiskey. Never since then have I had a really drunken night where I thought, ‘God, I really regret that’.

I do get a hangover but I have so much work to do that I don’t have time to go to bed and feel sick and sorry for myself. The worst kind of hangover is not the little bit of fuzziness, it’s the Fear and that kind of pity and shame and guilt, and that, ‘Oh God, what did I do?’ I don’t have that because I act as outrageously sober as I do drunk, so there isn’t any big difference in my behaviour sober and drunken behaviour. I’m inclined to pull my underpants down and sing a funny song on a table in somebody’s kitchen. I’m just as likely to do that whether I’m having a gin or not. So I don’t get the Fear . . . . sure I might get a bit of a headache.

But I’ll always try to ward off the hangover by having a pint of water beside me and I’ll drink that. Then I’ll have my Alka-Seltzer, Berrocca, and honey and lemon tea and just get on with the day.

My favourite drink is probably lager. But I drink everything. I drink red wine, white wine, gin, everything except whiskey. I think that whiskey, for me anyway, is too much of an emotional drink. Whatever part of your brain whiskey taps into it’s certainly not the crack.

My hangover cure has to be a dirty chicken roll from Centra.

Could I imagine my life without alcohol? This is one of the questions my Doctor has asked me and this is one of the questions that my psychoanalyst asked me when I was in therapy. If somebody dared me or said that they would give me money or as a challenge to give up alcohol for a year, I’d do it tomorrow. Because I’m very competitive. But I don’t want to imagine my life without alcohol; I’d be quite a bad role model, because drinking a lot isn’t really harming me.