ADRIAN Chiles is the kind of affable bloke you’d like to meet in a pub. “I still spend too much time in pubs,” he says.

Adrian recently married Guardian editor Katharine Viner at Jervaulx Abbey in North Yorkshire. Viner was raised in Yorkshire and went to Ripon Grammar School, so the pair spend a lot of time in Yorkshire.

“A friend of mine happened to be in York and was talking to a taxi driver about football,” Adrian says. “He said he’s a West Brom supporter, and the taxi driver said, ‘Oh yeah that Adrian Chiles is a West Brom supporter and you often see him in the pubs in York’. It made me laugh; it made it sound that all I did was sit in pubs in York.”

Chiles co-presented the One Show and Daybreak with Christine Lampard, was chief presenter for football on ITV Sport, and presented Working Lunch, The Money Programme, Match of the Day 2, and works for BBC Radio 5 Live, as well as writing columns for the Sun and the Guardian.

He’s heading back north for Ilkley Literature Festival this month, to give a talk on his new book, The Good Drinker: How I Learned to Love Drinking Less.

Bradford Telegraph and Argus: Adrian's book looks at his relationship with drinking Adrian's book looks at his relationship with drinking (Image: Submitted)

Chiles first turned the spotlight on to himself with his BBC documentary Drinkers Like Me. “There was a conversation I had with Frank Skinner, we were having dinner and he said, oh you don’t drink very much. I said if there was a party across the road now with 100 of my best friends in it, I wouldn’t be looking forward to it if I knew I wasn’t going to be allowed to have a drink there. He was really shocked by that. And then I thought, ‘I’m actually shocked by that’. The more I looked into it, I thought I must have some kind of dependence on alcohol.”

He began to confront his own drinking: “At the time, one of the shows I did was late Thursday night, so obviously I wouldn’t drink on those nights, but every other day of that week I’d have a drink. And I couldn’t remember the last day I didn’t have a drink, apart from those Thursday nights.”

Then he made the documentary. “For the first time ever, I did what I now recommend everyone to do, which is to record how much you’re drinking. On the first day I’d gone to the football, then to a party, and didn’t feel particularly drunk and it didn’t feel like a big drinking day but I’d done 36 units. I thought, ‘hang on there’s something wrong here, that’s a monstrous amount’.”

He calculated that if he lined up every drink he’d ever had it would stretch over three miles. “A lot of the drinking was just pointless. The real tragedy is if I looked at how many of those were drinks I really wanted, needed or enjoyed I think it’s only about a third of them. So I cut the pointless drinks out. I just thought which drinks do I really need, want and enjoy and try and restrict myself to them.”

Adrian is aware of the blurry - no pun intended - lines between binge drinking, psychological dependency and physical addiction, which destroys lives. “Some believe you’re born with a predisposition; that if you have one drop of alcohol that’s you done and you’ll become an alcoholic. I’m not sure how true that is. It’s not necessarily written in the stars that you’re going to have a problematic relationship with alcohol. But it can’t do any harm to draw attention to the fact that if you’re drinking 50, 60 units a week, you might not be waking up in a shop doorway but you’ll be on your way to a place where you’ll be waking up in a shop doorway.”

He blames ‘social norming’ for binge drinking. “We all think everybody drinks too much, but half the adult population never go to pubs or clubs. The figures show about 70per cent of people do drink within the guidelines. The problem is, drinkers like me surround ourselves with other drinkers. So, every greeting card you see has drink on the card. We’re only choosing to see the other drinkers.”

The book is for people who like drinking. “The point is you can drink less and enjoy it more. If you boil it down to drinks you enjoy, you will enjoy your drinking more; there’s no doubt of that in my mind.”

Prior to cutting down the booze, Adrian spoke out about anxiety and depression. Do people drink alcohol to escape their problems, or does alcohol cause the problems? “What comes first is something psychologists will debate to the end of time. It’s kind of both. In the end drinking probably did a bit more harm than good. There was a positive side. But it’s keeping that in check. It’s being aware.”

In terms of advice on cutting down, he says ultimately it’s about being mindful. “The main thing is to count units, and not judge yourself. Use an app like Drink Less. Don’t judge yourself, don’t worry yourself stupid, just monitor it.”

He says life has improved now he drinks a third of what he did - 20-30 units a week. “A lot of people who drink too much convince themselves they haven’t got a problem because they’re not outwardly struggling, but they might be storing problems up. There is a way of getting it under control. You don’t have to stop completely and you don’t have to go the other way and get lost in it. There is a third way.”

* Adrian Chiles is at King’s Hall, Ilkley, on Saturday, October 15. Visit ilkleyliteraturefestival.org.uk