One for the Road: The Quit Drinking Podcast

This week on  One For The Road , Dave is joined by Liberty X star Michelle Heaton for one of the rawest and most brutally honest conversations of the series. From pop fame, red carpets and chart success to addiction, intervention, rehab and rock bottom — Michelle opens up about the reality behind the headlines. She speaks candidly about living with the BRCA gene, undergoing a double mastectom...

Millie Gooch is the founder of Sober Girl Society, author of The Sober Girl Society Handbook, and one of the loudest voices in the UK sober community for women in their twenties. But four years ago she was a blackout drinker. She didn't drink at all until 18, then went to uni, took three bar jobs, got paid in alcohol, and came out the other side a four-or-five-night-a-week binge drinker. PR and jo...

Ollie Ollerton was 10 years old when a 50-pound chimpanzee pinned him to the floor of a circus enclosure and tried to kill him. He fought it off. Nearly lost his arm to gangrene. Then spent the next thirty-something years chasing danger to feel something close to that adrenaline again. Royal Marines. Special Forces. Iraq, where he drove drunk through Baghdad on his own with an AK-47 in the back of...

Lucy Norfolk met Daniel backstage at a London theatre. He was funny, kind, the centre of every room. He was also, slowly, becoming an alcoholic. This is the story rarely told. Not the person in recovery. The partner watching it unfold. Lucy takes us through years of loving Dan: the hiding, the vodka behind the chair while she bathed, the first fit at the park in front of their children, the shatte...

What does it take to finally quit drinking when you feel like you can’t stop? In this episode, we dive into a powerful sobriety journey that explores the reality of  blackout drinking, alcohol addiction recovery, and mental health . Jordan Hurt shares his story of growing up around alcohol, developing addictive patterns early, and using drinking as a way to cope with identity, pressure, and p...

In this episode of One for the Road, Sober Dave sits down with Allie Bailey, ultra runner, running coach, speaker and author, for an honest conversation about what really happens after you quit drinking. This is emotional sobriety. The uncomfortable bits. The parts of recovery nobody warns you about. Allie started drinking at 14, spent years as a functioning alcoholic in the music industry, hit ro...

In this episode, I sit down with Steve Smith to talk about a side of drinking that often gets overlooked. Life can look good on the outside—work, responsibilities, everything in place—but underneath, something feels off. Low energy. Poor sleep. Always needing something to take the edge off at the end of the day. Not rock bottom. But not where you want to be either. We talk about what it looks like...

Sue Tickle was a senior NHS manager, a mum of two, and secretly drinking two to three bottles of wine every single night. Nobody at work knew. Nobody stepped in. Then one morning after blacking out at her sister's hen party, her mum rang and said five words that changed her life. "You're turning into your dad." Sue never touched another drink. That was over seven years ago. In this episode she and...

What happens when you're winning championships but blacking out every single night? Five-time champion jockey Oisin Murphy opens up about the moment he knew he had to quit drinking. He started drinking at home alone in 2017 to escape the pressure of racing, texting his driver to pick up bottles of vodka before he even left the track. He convinced himself alcohol was helping him perform. By COVID h...

Kate Renninson spent decades as the one who would drink everyone under the table and wore it like a badge of honor. This is a sobriety story that so many women will recognize. Growing up with a difficult mother who never showed her warmth, Kate found that alcohol gave her the attention and acceptance she craved. She carried that into marriage, motherhood, and the whole mummy wine culture of Sunday...

Liver cirrhosis nearly took everything from Dan Sheridan, and the moment doctors told him he might not survive the night changed his life forever. Dan grew up feeling like he never fitted in, lost his dad to cancer, and spent years drinking 18 cans of Stella a day just to stop the shaking. At 40 he was told he had cirrhosis of the liver and two years to live, but he walked straight to Sainsbury's...

This episode is for every mom who has ever rushed the bedtime story so she could get back to the wine. Caitlyn's story of finally choosing to quit drinking will stop you in your tracks. She grew up moving between 17 houses and nine schools, started drinking at 10, was smoking weed daily by 16, and fell into cocaine in a Kensington penthouse before she was 18. For years she hid her addiction behind...

Dave was gone by one o'clock on Christmas Day. Carving the turkey half cut, nearly taking his fingers off, while the rest of the family clinked glasses around him. That was the old version of Christmas. In this special Christmas episode, Dave sits down again with William Porter, author of Alcohol Explained, to talk honestly about why the festive season is so loaded for anyone questioning their dri...

Ash Malimba was 12 when he had his first drink on a football tour. By 15, he was deep in London's rave scene doing pills, cocaine, and ketamine. By his early 20s, he was the frontman of a band touring the world, with promoters handing him whatever he wanted. Three suicide attempts followed. So did years of failed sobriety attempts and an AA experience that didn't stick. Then he lost a friend to ca...

Alexi Cruz grew up chasing chaos because it was the only thing that felt like home. In this episode of One for the Road, the Brighton hairdresser and creative opens up about a childhood split between two cultures, parents who couldn't stay together, and a pattern of drinking that started at 14 just to belong. From losing her first love Tom to cancer, surviving an attack abroad, and cycling through...

Brad Garrett has been making people laugh for decades, but behind the comedy was a man who loved numbing more than anything. In this conversation Brad opens up about growing up with a mother addicted to sleeping pills and a bipolar father he adored, being bullied as a giant awkward kid, and turning to comedy just to survive. He was a high functioning alcoholic and daily weed smoker who could do a...

At 47, Alex lives in Athens, wakes up with energy, and doesn't hide bottles in her shopping anymore. That wasn't her life three years ago. Her dad died when she was seven. By fourteen, she'd found the first thing that made the pain go quiet. By sixteen, she was an international model flying first class, doing lines at the agency on Friday nights, losing years of a dream career to blackouts she can...

Dan was 27, 29 stone, and paralytic drunk at his dad's 50th when he hit the kitchen tiles the next morning. His lips went blue. He stopped breathing. His mum called an ambulance. Lying on the A&E stretcher, he made her a promise he'd heard people break a thousand times. He meant it. Dan has epilepsy. He'd been told at 18 not to drink on his medication. He'd been skipping doses for years so the...

Justin T-Bone is 10 years sober after 25 years of drinking that started the week he walked away from being a top-three sprinter in the country. In this recovery story, he walks through how he quit drinking — from running bars, nightclubs and award-winning restaurants as a functioning alcoholic, to four months alone in a rented garage getting sober. Justin opens up about Suffolk's 100m county recor...

Four children in every UK classroom are growing up in hygiene poverty. They share toothbrushes, wash their hair in soap, and skip PE because they have nothing to clean themselves with afterwards. Many of them carry that shame straight into addiction. This is a special bonus episode of One for the Road. Sober Dave sits down with Mike Kidney, CEO of the charity In Kind Direct, and Darren Langdon, ma...

Nina was on holiday with her family when her ten year old son put his arm around his little sister and said, "Don't worry, she'll just order five more bottles of rose and then she'll say yes." That was the moment that broke. She grew up in Hong Kong, watched her mum drink herself into hospital at 14, and learned young how to mask things with booze. By her twenties she was drinking alone in her Lon...

For years, Annie Knowles was sure her husband was the one with the drinking problem. He was in AA. She was just a normal wine mum, two-bottles-in-the-fridge kind of drinker. Three and a half years sober, she knows now that was never true. Annie is the only adopted child in a family of seven, a working NHS sonographer, and one half of a marriage where both people eventually got sober through comple...

When people quit drinking, they expect relief. Instead, many feel grief. That's what Dave sits down to explore with Julia Samuel MBE, psychotherapist of 30+ years and best-selling author of Grief Works. This conversation goes places most sobriety podcasts don't. Why unresolved grief fuels addiction. Why 70% of mental health struggles trace back to grief we've never let ourselves feel. Why Gabor Ma...

Niall Harbison nearly drank himself to death in Thailand at 41. Four days in ICU. A six-week bender of three bottles of wine, Valium, and whiskey, three times a day. He quit smoking, drinking, and pills in one go. He grew up in Belgium, an only child. His mum left when he was 13. He watched her get beaten by the man she left for, and he froze in the hallway. The drinking started at 14. The escape...

Kate Annetts sounds like she's been drinking. She hasn't touched a drop in two years. At 22, she started slurring, falling, spilling drinks. GPs told her some people are just a bit wobbly. Seven years later she got a diagnosis: Friedreich's ataxia, a rare progressive condition. No cure. No mental health support. Just a letter and a goodbye. So she drank. A bottle of wine a night in bed in a Bright...