CHEGGERS BOOZE SUICIDE HELL
CBB’S Keith Chegwin considered suicide during his decade-long battle with booze, becoming so hooked on alcohol he hid bottles of whisky all around the house.
The TV star known to the nation as cheerful Cheggers even swigged bottles of Night Nurse and cough mixture when he couldn’t get a normal drink.
It took three trips to rehab to beat his demons – but by then wife Maggie Philbin, his co-presenter on children’s show Swap Shop, had left him and taken their young daughter Rose, now 26.
He revealed: “There were times when I just wanted to die and just end it all. I’d had enough.”
Opening up to his CBB housemates this week, Keith, 58, said: “I hid it everywhere. I’d do all the tricks – I hid it in suit pockets, guttering and down the back of the sofa, car, everywhere.”
He first went to rehab after regularly blacking out and wetting the bed while drinking two bottles of whisky a day. But he was soon back on the booze, picking up bottles of whisky on trips to shops. “I drank half and threw the bottle in a hedge on the way home,” he admitted in his autobiography Shaken But Not Stirred.
“Then I went back and finished it off later. I was willing to lose everything – my wife, my daughter and my home – for a drink.”
He bravely owned up to his alcoholism to TV hosts Richard and Judy on This Morning in 1992, a major turning point.
He finally cleaned himself up and in 2000 he married his former PA Maria Fielden. They have a son Ted, now 16.