An endearingly honest film about social drinking and us
The BBC really knows how to cap off an enjoyable bank holiday. There we were, feet up, relaxing, enjoying a nice bottle of wine, when up pops Drinkers Like Me: Adrian Chiles (BBC Two), in which the former football and One Show presenter embarked on a heartfelt reassessment of his relationship with alcohol. Talk about sobering.
Not that Chiles is an alcoholic. “This isn’t a programme about drinking sherry in the morning or waking up in shop doorways,” he was at pains to point out. “It’s about nice regular drinking, and the damage quietly being done to ourselves and our society by drinkers like me.” You could feel the needle on the guilt-ometer begin to twitch.
Chiles gave us various snapshots of his life as a non-dependent drinker. Such as downing multiple pints of Guinness at 11 o’clock in the morning with mates ahead of a football match. When he calculated his intake, he seemed to exceed the 14-unit recommended maximum not on a weekly, but on a daily basis. True, he was focusing on his own drinking. But the message was clear. He was holding a mirror up to anyone who tips over that limit now and again, however less spectacularly.
Professor Paul Nutt put his finger on it when he told Chiles that comparing oneself to an alcoholic isn’t helpful. Some people – ie, a lot of people – just drink rather more than is good for them. Cutting down would be good; total abstinence is not required. Chiles went for a check-up and his liver function was “normal”. We shared in his both his surprise and relief. Then he had a more thorough test and the result came back as “at risk of progression to fibrosis and liver failure”. Corks went back into bottles across the UK.
There followed a lot more soulsearching and expert-consulting. And, after what felt like a genuinely titanic struggle, Chiles eventually got his consumption down to 25 units a week. He didn’t look any happier. In many ways he looked as though the misery of cutting down might do for him quicker than the actual drinking. But it was a heroic effort, and one that will have left many viewers thinking over their own tendency to have an extra glass or three, without considering the long-term consequences. All in all, a good, honest and often very entertaining film from a presenter whose ability to combine ordinarybloke-next-doorness with clear-eyed self-criticism was very endearing – and perfect for the subject in hand.
Television’s aversion to crashing short attention spans nowadays means it is rare to find an old-fashioned star interview with an actor, such as Riz Ahmed: Road to
(BBC Two), taking up a whole half-hour of mainstream screen time.
Thankfully, the BBC’S British Asian Summer season was an ideal opportunity to meet this talented man whose story arc has been stellar of late, following breakout roles in The Reluctant Fundamentalist with an Emmy-winning lead performance in HBO’S 2016 series The Night Of and a major role in the Star Wars spin-off, Rogue One. He even made the cover of Time magazine last year as one of the most influential people of 2017.
Conducted by Nikki Bedi, the interview’s focus, nominally at least, was Englistan, the BBC drama series Ahmed created, which depicts the life of a British Pakistani family from the Seventies to the present day. But as Englistan is still in the pipeline, there wasn’t a great deal that could be said about it. Instead, the conversation concentrated on how Ahmed’s own British Pakistani background fed into his success, and how the film business’s penchant for stereotyping can be transcended, even subverted, until you’re a big enough name for ethnicity to no longer be a factor.
Ahmed was particularly strong on identity politics and the difficulties facing actors from minority backgrounds in Britain, and how more forward-looking moviemaking in the United States means there are more opportunities and better roles on offer there. The more political Ahmed got, the more the sense of a strong, creative intelligence emerged from behind the poised actorly exterior. Never more so than when he was passionately arguing the vital need for Britain to “rediscover an inclusive national narrative”, especially now, in the run-up to Brexit.
Assuming this same degree of passion and concern carries through into his writing of Englistan, it’s fair to say that Ahmed’s drama has a seriously strong chance of making a big impact. I for one very much look forward to seeing it.
Drinkers Like Me: Adrian Chiles Riz Ahmed: Road to Englistan
SKY ARTS, 11.00PM