And, in some ways it doesn’t matter; your liver doesn’t care if you’re an alcoholic or a heavy drinker. Over his career he has fronted ITV's football coverage, co-presented Daybreak, launched multiple BBC show including The One Show, and presented several documentaries and documentary series. At a session with a psychotherapist who specialises in addiction, John McKeown, he explores the mental health issues that could be related to his drinking.

He can reverse the damage, but it involves drinking much less and having three to four consecutive alcohol-free days. His journalistic training and love of football resulted in his presenting business programmes such as Working Lunch and The Money Programme as well as sports programmes like Match of the Day 2. There was a conversation I had with Frank Skinner, we were having dinner and he said, oh you don’t drink very much.AC: And now you must talk, to some extent, about sobriety – presumably there’s not a lot of comedy in lecturing people. In the past, you could have filled a room with all my favourite people in the world, and if I wasn’t allowed to drink, I wouldn’t really be looking forward to seeing them. I never linked any of that with my general inability to focus on anything for more than about 15 seconds. AC: I’ve probably got down to between 20 and 30 a week, which is still too much, but it’s a third of what I was drinking.

It’s not necessarily written in the stars that you’re going to have a problematic relationship with alcohol. AC: There’s a therapist I interviewed for my book, and one of the things she does is go through each drink of an evening, and marks what benefit you get from it. Sitting alongside his propensity to admit his ignorance is an attractive willingness to listen to anyone, of any age or social station, who might tell him something meaningful .The risky side-effect of them was that they could elevate my blood pressure but, to the joy of all concerned, my numbers actually fell.