WRITER OPENS UP ON NEW TV SHOW ABOUT ADDICTION I know that my mother wanted to stop drinkng and she just couldn’t.. she only lived 36 years
Darren McGarvey is using his own life story to drive the message home about booze and the unhealthy place it has in Scottish society
THE rapper-turned-writer Darren McGarvey is back on our TV screens next week. Reluctantly. Darren is fronting a three-part series on addiction, with the first episode on alcohol, while the other programmes look at food, drugs and gambling.
A former drink and drug addict, Darren admitted: “I would rather not have done the show but, Covid excluded, this is the big urgent health issue that’s facing Scotland just now.
“It was hard work going back into that world, that chaos, being around it all. But I figured someone would go ahead and make it anyway without me. I didn’t want to end up sitting shouting at my telly.”
There is no doubt Scotland has a problem with more than 1000 drinkrelated deaths in 2021. Around three people die daily from liver disease. It is the fourth biggest cause of premature death in those between 35 and 49.
As former Record columnist Darren, 38, points out – that’s him. Darren won the prestigious Orwell Prize for his 2017 book Poverty Safari. Since then he has rarely talked about his own family circumstances.
But in Addictions, he revisits the tragedy of his mother who died of autoimmune hepatitis in her 30s.
In the show, he visits a liver unit in Dumfries and Galloway and meets a woman suffering from the same condition. It’s not easy to watch.
He said on screen: “That 53-year-old lady is in a place where her liver is so unwell that it’s ringing alarm bells off all around her body including her immune system.
“The doctor is explaining that this is her last chance. And on a very basic level that is not registering. She is still underestimating how much of a role alcohol has played. “What a cruel condition.” He then has to take a break from filming.
Afterwards he reflected: “With what happened to my mother, it was less
how it affected me, and more how it affected her. She only lived 36 years. That shows you the power of addiction, I know she wanted to stop and she just couldn’t.
“It’s a significant part of my story. I was exposed to alcoholic behaviour. I also learned that this is what you do when you’re sad, this is what you do when you’re stressed.”
Growing up, Darren had the normal Scottish teenage experiences.
He said on the show: “I experimented with alcohol in my teens. The school dance, drinking in a park.
“But it was when I was living by myself and I was lonely that alcohol helped.
“It helped me when I was on my own. It helped me when I was out. And it just became something that was eventually intertwined with pretty much every activity that you could mention.”
That, for Darren, is a huge part of Scotland’s problem with drink. Everything, from births to deaths, weddings and birthdays, is celebrated by opening a bottle.
It’s sewn in to big sporting events. He watches a Six Nations rugby match with a researcher who has studied alcohol advertising in sport.
Sure enough, there are ads for major drinks brands throughout the game. Darren said: “It was as if someone was following me around and whispering ‘Guinness’ in my ear.
He wants Scots to stop and ask why they can’t watch the football without booze brands in the corner of their eye. “What does an advertiser who is spending hundreds of millions of pounds a year promoting their product want in return for their investment?
“If it didn’t lead to more people buying their product, they wouldn’t invest that money.
“These companies don’t become so wealthy and so powerful by p***ing their money away frivolously like the rest of us do, buying their lager and their beer and their whisky.
“It has a significant impact and contributes to the cultural acceptance of excess drinking.”
Then there are the brands that come with a reputation beyond billboards. “Buckfast isn’t actually advertised but word of mouth is so strong with certain products that they don’t need to advertise.”
Darren realises that, in Scotland, sobriety is a hard sell. “It’s hard to broach these topics and not come across as some puritan who’s judging people for how they drink and how they behave. That’s not where I’m coming from.” But it’s hard for one person to stand up to such a dominant culture force. “Drinking is seen as a cool thing to do. We don’t have many examples of people in Scotland who don’t partake or who can have fun without it. “That means the people who do stop drinking can become subject to weird questions and seen as a bit of an oddball. “The hip hop community, where I acquired my alcoholic habit, had no examples for me.” Until his childhood hero, Eminem, got clean in the 2000s, Darren had no role models. “I was a big fan. After he got sober after he nearly died from a methadone overdose, I started thinking maybe it’s possible. Until then there was no one in the music industry who had stopped drinking and been public about it.
“When I tried to get sober I did find people outwith these communities. But there’s not a lot of people on the telly or charts or movies who say: I live a nice life, I’m happy, I don’t drink.”
His takeaway from making the series is that booze is not just a problem for alcoholics. It costs the health service, social work and the criminal justice system billions every year. It hurts everyone.
“I tried to show the plight of the individuals affected by this but it doesn’t just affect people with a severe problem. It’s all of us.
“The people in Scotland who don’t drink too much hardly drink at all. Everyone else drinks a bit too much and everyone else knows it.” ●Darren McGarvey’s Addictions, BBC Scotland, Thursday, 10pm.
It’s hard to broach and not come across as a puritan