One for the Road: The Quit Drinking Podcast

She was getting ready for a champagne lunch when her hands started shaking so badly she couldn't put her mascara on. It was 10 in the morning. She poured a drink to steady herself. This week on One for the Road, Dave sits down with Georgie Humphrey, the Liverpool-born mum behind Painting The Town Sober. Georgie shares the full arc, from rave culture at 14, to working as a "drinks specialist" for t...

Trevor Toohig was the bar owner pulling his own pints. Ten a day. Sometimes more, with spirits on top. He started at 13. Diamond White and Thunderbirds in the park. Stella in his bedroom by 16. By his late twenties, nine pints in a Sutton pub ended with his bright green Nissan in the Carshalton Ponds and a drink driving charge that almost ended his teaching career. Marriage. Divorce. A second chan...

She was the queen of natural health. Coconut oil. Kale. Five books on clean living. And a bottle of wine most nights. Janey Lee Grace was a backing singer with Wham, co-hosted Steve Wright in the Afternoon on BBC Radio 2 for 24 years, and looked, by every external measure, fine. But she was waking at 3am most days asking herself how she'd ended up there again. No rock bottom. No prison cells. Just...

He played 178 games at scrum half for Leicester Tigers. From the outside it looked like the dream. Inside, he was planning his week around how many beers he could get away with. This week on One for the Road, Dave sits down with Sam Harrison, former Premiership rugby player turned carpenter, now sober on the Gold Coast. Sam shares the full arc, from making his mum's gin and tonics as a four-year-o...

He spent his days trying to find $15 in his pocket. That was enough for a case of beer, two packs of menthols, and another afternoon outside himself. He slept on his brother's floor. He'd already done time. He couldn't stop. This week on One for the Road, Dave sits down with his good friend Brad McLeod, host of the Sober Motivation podcast. Brad shares the full arc, from a kid moved across countri...

He'd polished off a bottle of Calvados and woken up on the kitchen floor. Four in the morning, lights still on. His wife found him there. That wasn't the moment Alex Norwood-Hill quit drinking. The real turning point came months later on a stag do in Ibiza. Alex spent three decades in hospitality. London. Miami. Restaurants for Michael Caine. Cocaine to mow the lawn. He made martinis for three Jam...

Susan Christina is Irish, lives in Madrid, and for fifteen years drank a bottle of wine a night while running a family, a career, and three boys. Nobody knew. She walked through the door, dropped her bag, opened the wine before her coat was off, and was three and a half glasses in by dinner. She had no big trauma. No rock bottom anyone could see. Just a slow, quiet erosion of the woman she used to...

Louisa Evans drank a bottle of wine a night, alone, watching Coronation Street. She was also the therapist helping other people quit their habits. She first tried to stop in 2012. Lasted five days. For the next ten years she had rules. Pretty little glasses. Four sober nights a week. None of it worked, because alcohol doesn't play by anyone's rules. Louisa tells Dave what finally cracked it. The h...

Laura Dockrill thought new motherhood would glow. A week after giving birth to her son Jet, she was hearing voices in the radio and convinced the teddy bears were filming her on CCTV. That was postpartum psychosis. It hits one in 1,000 women. Laura ended up sectioned in a psychiatric ward, separated from her newborn for three weeks. She came home on antipsychotics, antidepressants, and two types o...

Mandy Manners siphoned her parents' homemade wine at six years old. By her late twenties she was a French university teacher in heels and a suit, picking up her toddlers stinking of Belgian beer. She had a year sober in 2013. Then she convinced herself she was "fixed" and could drink like a normal person. Three more years of moderation rules, dry Januaries, and summer holiday car crashes followed....

Amber Hughes was 22 when professionals told her she could not take her sister home. Hannah was four times over the limit, sleeping rough in Oxford, and 40 units of wine a day deep. Hannah had a flat. A degree. She wanted to be a teacher and own a chocolate Labrador. Then alcohol took everything. The flat, repossessed. The relationships, gone. Four or five bottles of wine at a co-op till her younge...

Gemma Rose Barnes walked onto Married at First Sight UK looking for a husband. She was also hiding an addiction. For years wine and cocaine moved together in her life. Lockdown made it daily. By the time the show wrapped, the decanters of free-flowing wine on set had quietly fed something she could not name on camera. She tried the NHS first. Got told at least it hadn't been 20 years. Fell at the...

Hot flushes. Brain fog. Anxiety. 3am wake up. Bloating. Low mood. That list works for excessive drinking and for perimenopause. Which is exactly why so many women in their 40s and 50s cannot tell which one is wrecking them, and reach for the wine to cope with both. Dr Rebecca Lewis is a GP, menopause specialist, and clinical director at Newson Health. Her clinic sees 4,000 women a month. She tells...

Danny Bennett had the loving family. The decent school. The holidays every year. None of it stopped the addiction. By his mid-20s he was 11 stone on a six-foot-four frame, doing three day cocaine benders, neck full of diazepam to come down, washed down with cans of lager. His mum and dad let themselves into his Birmingham flat every day to check he was still alive. Rehab once wasn't enough. The fi...

Sarah Rusbatch was always the new girl. Moving between Edinburgh, the south of England, and Manchester meant Sarah never quite felt like she belonged. When she discovered alcohol at 14, it solved that problem overnight. It would take another 25 years to realise the cost. In this episode, Sober Dave sits down with Sarah, a health and wellness coach now based in Perth, Australia, who shares one of t...

Dan O'Reilly, better known as Dapper Laughs, was one of the first social media stars to hit a million Facebook followers. He was also a man whose whole career, identity, and friendship circle ran on drinking and cocaine. Then ITV cancelled his show. The tour pulled. His dad had a stroke weeks later and Dan had to make the call to turn off the machine. Days after that, his then-girlfriend told him...

Helen Bennett is a bulimia and disordered eating coach who spent 20 years caught in a cycle she couldn't talk about. In this conversation with Sober Dave, she explains why so many people who quit drinking find their relationship with food gets harder, not easier, and what to do about it. This one's different. Halfway through, Dave gets coached on his own relationship with peanut butter, the clean...

Jodie Clark looked completely fine from the outside. Two kids. A husband she loved. A career she was thriving in. Monday morning meetings with senior leadership she always nailed. She also drank a bottle of red wine on her own most nights, gained a lot of weight during COVID, started falling over on her way to bed, and once sat next to her newborn baby in his Moses basket feeling frustrated that h...

Simon Thomas was a household name. Blue Peter presenter number 27. Sky Sports Premier League. The job he'd dreamed of since he was a kid. And then, in November 2017, his wife Gemma was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukaemia on a Tuesday and gone by Friday morning. She was 40. Their son Ethan was 8. Three weeks after the funeral, Simon found a bottle of gin in the kitchen cupboard. He poured it int...

Andy Ramage had everything. The career, the money, the title. And he still felt five out of ten. That's where this conversation starts. Not at a rock bottom. At a slow grinding epiphany in a successful broker's life that he wasn't actually well, just busy. Andy walks Dave through quitting drinking nine years ago, the social pressure that nearly stopped him, and the moment his business grew seven t...

Jenna Hewitt looked completely fine from the outside. A thriving business in the wedding industry. Two kids. A husband who barely drinks. Strong friendships. Good runs with her training partner on weekends. What no one saw was the three years of waking up at 3am, Googling "am I an alcoholic," reading every quit-lit book in secret, doing sober stints that kept collapsing, and feeling like she was l...

Rich Evans spent 25 years in the fashion industry. He was a stylist, then fashion editor, then fashion director of FHM. He worked at Nuts and Front. He sat at desks where girls in bikinis dropped off crates of Carling and the editor's rule was that the work didn't start until everyone had a three-pint buzz. He loved every minute of it. And then, around 35, the same routine that built his career st...

Ceri Walker was four years old the first time she saw her mum's eyes change. She didn't have a word for what she was seeing, but she knew. By nine, she was the one who stole the keys out of her violent stepfather's pocket while he was passed out and ran with her mum to safety. By her teens, she was keeping the family secret at all costs. Her mum died when Kerry was 21. She'd lived with her for 21...

Sam Phillips shares his story of how drinking started young and slowly took over his life. Growing up with anxiety, overthinking, and constant fear, alcohol felt like a solution at first. It gave him confidence, helped him fit in, and quieted everything going on in his head. But over time, that relief didn’t last. What started as weekend drinking turned into daily drinking, isolation, and eventual...

Why do so many women in their 40s and 50s feel like they cant stop drinking wine? This week on One for the Road, mindset coach Janey Holliday sits down with Sober Dave for one of the most important conversations on the podcast yet. Janey has coached women for over 20 years and her theory is that this generation has been programmed to drink — through decades of subliminal messaging, wine mom cultur...