Drinkers Like Me – Adrian Chiles review: the complicated, conflicted world of boozing

The broadcaster’s film about ‘nice, regular drinking’ soon becomes an analysis of much more, from his physical and mental health to society’s difficult relationship with alcohol

Adrian Chiles has a drinking problem. Or maybe he has an Adrian Chiles problem, alleviated by drinking. Anyway, he’s definitely not an alcoholic, he says in his exploration of “nice, regular drinking” in Drinkers Like Me – Adrian Chiles (BBC Two). He can’t be, because he doesn’t wake up in a shop doorway at 4am, or in bed with a stranger. He doesn’t get into fights or fall over. But here he is at 10.20am putting away a pint in the pub with his friends. The excuse is it’s matchday and an early kick-off – there’s always an excuse. “There’s drinking and there’s drinking,” says his friend Kev. Getting through a few morning pints isn’t the same as the lads he knows who get stuck into the Sambuca. By 11.30, they have had four lagers.

The delusions and arbitrary rules we live by are exposed to the light. Chiles’s friend Sarah can’t be an alcoholic, she explains, because she’s “not a vommer”. Another man, Mark, drinks 80 to 100 units a week and has high blood pressure and cholesterol; he’s on beta blockers. “We’re addicted to it without being alcoholics,” he says, which is the kind of mental gymnastics you can only perform when you have had a few.

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from The Guardian https://ift.tt/2MWSDtQ

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