When comedian and podcaster John Robins looks back at 30 years of drinking, his impulse is to recall the good times. He’ll remember the lubricated dinners out with friends or the “perfect pint in the perfect pub”, he says. “I tend to forget the 99 per cent of times where it was just me, alone and hating myself.”
Robins, who has been sober since November 2022, has written a memoir documenting his life in alcohol and path to sobriety. Bracingly candid and darkly funny, Thirst is a far cry from the radio shows and podcasts in which Robins and friends used to jovially detail boozy nights out. Instead, the book goes deep into the bad times as it recalls the drinks that both shaped and nearly destroyed him and shines a light on the dangerous spell cast by booze.
Those drinks include the bottle of Jacob’s Creek wine left out by Robins’ mother on the kitchen worktop that he helped himself to aged seven, disguising it with orange juice. There’s also his recreation, while on tour in Australia, of the white Russians drunk by The Dude in The Big Lebowski using a gallon of milk, a litre of vodka and a bottle of Kahlua. As Robins spent the next day “throwing up a luminous yellow bile”, he remained in denial, attributing the vomiting not to the vodka but the milk.
Robins, 44, is talking over video call from his home in Buckinghamshire, where he has lived alone for 10 years. Behind him I can see floor-to-ceiling shelving containing books, various awards, plus music memorabilia including framed drawings and figurines of Freddie Mercury (Queen were Robins’ musical obsession as a teenager).
He is open and affable, moving between dryly funny and calmly reflective as he discusses his years under the influence. Robins is best known for his broadcasting career, which began on Radio X, where he presented the Saturday afternoon show with his friend and fellow comedian Elis James. The pair later moved to BBC Radio 5 Live, where they launched the awards-laden How Do You Cope? with Elis and John podcast, about life’s toughest moments, and where they amassed 50 million downloads. While in the throes of addiction, Robins also launched the podcast The Moon Under Water with his childhood friend Robin Allender, which was essentially one long paean to pubs.
Robins is also a celebrated stand-up. His early comedy, much like his radio, would chronicle larky nights out, though later it took an introspective turn: he won the Edinburgh Comedy Award in 2017 for his stand-up show The Darkness of Robins, which documented his break-up with the comedian Sara Pascoe, while 2019’s sell-out Hot Shame tour delved into his dating life and struggles with anxiety. Then came 2023’s Howl, which mined his new-found sobriety for laughs.
Thirst may have taken Robins to some difficult places, but he doesn’t hold with the notion of writing as catharsis. Instead, he says, the process allowed him to find out how he feels about alcohol, to see patterns of behaviour, and track the progress of his recovery. “I started writing it about a year sober when I was still exploring what an alcoholic was and what was necessary to live any kind of fulfilling life without alcohol,” he says. “Later, when coming back to those chapters when I was three years sober, I was like, ‘God, this guy thinks his life is over because he can’t drink any more.’ This was useful for me because I was re-reading stuff I’d written when I was quite angsty and discontented and [realising]: ‘Oh, that’s the trick alcohol has played on you’.”
There was no single rock-bottom moment that led to Robins quitting. It was more a case of feeling exhausted with having to arrange his life around drinking, and longing for relief. One day he confessed to his friend, the comic Lou Sanders: “I want to die. I want alcohol to be the thing that kills me. I’m going to drink myself to death.” She cried and told him he was an alcoholic and that he needed help. A few weeks later, he woke up in the night and put on a podcast called Sober Speak, in which two men were talking about sobriety. It was then that he decided to stop.
Robins joined a 12-step programme, which he describes now as a “very gentle, kind and supportive but quite challenging sort of ego death”. Prior to that, he had suffered from acute anxiety and was given to catastrophising. “Everything was about the self. As an alcoholic, you’ve spent your life thinking you’re the most important person in the world, but then you are given 12 steps, each of which is essentially saying you’re not the most important person in the world. When I came out of that process, I felt so empowered by my own insignificance.”
Another great revelation in his early recovery “was realising that alcohol was the problem, and then after that realising that alcohol was not the problem. Alcohol was what I used to treat the problem. So I had to start from scratch. Like, how do you build a person who doesn’t drink every day? And that involved lots of different things like therapy, exercise and meditation. I’ve found Buddhism very helpful. I’ve had to understand how I interact with my own thoughts.”
It’s with a combination of wryness and stoicism that Robins describes the way he feels now as “like having five or six rooms in my head where I can go. When I was drinking, I was permanently in the head office where everything was shit and I couldn’t cope. Now, if I get agitated or angry with myself, I can be, like, ‘Oh, we’ve stepped into the resentment room. We’re doing that today, are we? How about we pop back into the other room where it’s more chilled?’”
Asked if he thinks he was born an alcoholic or became one, Robins pauses. “I think that’s a bit like wondering, ‘Was I born with a peanut allergy or did I develop one?’” he replies. “Either way, it doesn’t really change my approach to peanuts. But I do think there’s something in my physiology that means I process alcohol differently to a lot of people.” Even as a child, he never saw alcohol as something to be consumed socially. In the book, he recalls going to scout camp at 13 and being given a bottle of beer by one of the leaders. Rather than drinking it in front of his peers, he “went full Gollum”, hiking to a nearby hill to drink it by himself.
Growing up in Thornbury near Bristol, the son of a counsellor mother and an aeronautic engineer father, Robins drank his way through secondary school yet still managed to be a good student, going on to study English at Oxford. At 23, he decided to try his luck as a stand-up and, after testing material at open-mic nights, began booking tours.
Early on in his career, he would become anxious comparing himself with other acts and wondering why he wasn’t getting the same TV opportunities. Later, he decided he would focus on what he could control, “which was writing, performing, making sure the radio show was good enough that we kept it. Over the years, the audience grew and I began to perform to rooms that were sold out with people who were excited to see me. Not only that, they’d heard me for hours on the radio, so they knew a lot about me.”
Television didn’t completely overlook Robins; he has been on shows including Mock The Week, Taskmaster (which he won), and has a YouTube channel with Alex Horne called Bad Golf. Yet he lost count of the meetings with TV commissioners for shows “that never happened because they would move to a different job, or there was no money, or whatever”. The rise of video podcasting has allowed him to do television on his own terms: “Me and Elis just launched a Patreon, and we’re putting out a 40-minute video a month, which our fans love, and it’s essentially what we always wanted to do on telly. So all those barriers that TV used to put in the way of comedians have gone. We can just make it ourselves now.”
For Robins, the process of writing a book has been both torturous – he says he read it 30 times in the editing process – and fascinating. “One thing that’s quite attractive about writing a book is you get to perfectly record how you feel and what you think, in theory anyway. With stand-up, no night is perfect, but with a book you can keep on honing it until you’re satisfied.”
Is he nervous about how it will be received? He shakes his head. “I find that if I’m happy with what I’ve created, it’s not for me to worry about whether people like it. How it goes down is really none of my business.”
‘Thirst‘, by John Robins, is published by Viking at £20