Drinkers Like Me: Adrian Chiles
“I’m not an alcoholic. At least, I don’t think I am,” states presenter Adrian Chiles at the beginning of this film about his lifelong relationship with drink. What strikes you from the outset is Chiles’s beguiling honesty about his drinking. He not only documents the amount he drinks, but also, and more tellingly, the times he fudges it and pretends to have drunk less.
This is key because the point the presenter is making is that many of us consume booze in this way. We wouldn’t say we’re alcoholics because we don’t “see spiders on the ceiling”, as comedian and recovering alcoholic Frank Skinner succinctly put it, and we don’t have a problem stopping after three or four drinks but drink regularly, in Chiles’s case often six out of seven of nights each week (the exception is the night before his morning show on Radio 5 Live).
It’s a way of consuming alcohol that’s increasingly prevalent among people in their forties and fifties and Chiles doesn’t shy away from exploring the potential consequences. The result is an engaging and revealing film which may well end up making more than one viewer reconsider their relationship with drink. Sarah Hughes