One for the Road: The Quit Drinking Podcast

Courtney Carver, author of Soulful Simplicity and Project 333, spent decades quietly managing her relationship with alcohol before she stopped on a hungover morning in January 2019. Nearly 1000 days later, she joins Sober Dave on One for the Road to talk about quitting drinking the simplest way she knows how. Courtney was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2006 and started stripping stress out o...

Catherine Gray woke up in a Brixton police cell at 27 years old. When the officers handed back her belongings, the only thing she had on her was a tiny pink glittery hairbrush that wasn't hers. No phone. No keys. No purse. Just a child's hairbrush she'd picked up off a dirty floor at some point during the night. You'd think that would be the moment she stopped. She drank for six more years. Cather...

Cherry Healy was drinking a bottle of wine a night by the time lockdown lifted. She had a brilliant career as a BBC presenter, a partner who barely drank, two kids she adored, and "wine o'clock" creeping into every evening. This is the story of a woman who caught herself in the gray area before it got worse. Cherry tells Sober Dave about being raised by an alcoholic father, watching her drinking e...

When Liam Fox was 12, he started taping his dad. He'd plug in a little radio cassette recorder, hit play and record, and capture his dad coming home drunk and talking through his backside. The next morning he'd play it back. His dad would be mortified. He'd swear he was never drinking again. A few months later, the cycle would start over. That cycle lasted 40 years. Liam's mum finally kicked his d...

Taner Hassan was 19 when 12 million people watched him audition on Pop Stars. He made the final 14 but didn't get the job. What followed was cocaine, nightclub work, and a slow collapse. By 24 he had drug-induced psychosis. His parents said: get help or get out. Taner grew up in Southend, oldest of three, chasing a music career through reality TV and boy bands. Rejection and fame without the job b...

Kate Rohan spent 25 years drinking, starting at 14 when alcohol gave her a way out of the bullying and eating disorders that marked her teens. By her late 20s she was a daily 5pm drinker who could never stop at one, finishing a bottle of rosé after running a half marathon in 1:35 and throwing up on her own shoes on a ski season in Verbier without slowing down. As perimenopause hit, alcohol made ev...

Lisa Riley was drinking a bottle and a half of wine a night after losing her mum. She used alcohol to numb grief, fuel the party, and fill a void she didn't yet understand. On this episode of One for the Road, the Emmerdale actress and TV presenter opens up about what finally made her stop and why she never looked back. Lisa shares how she went from being the last one standing at every gathering t...

Simon Chappell was drinking two to three bottles of red wine a day, plus beer on top, when his marriage started falling apart. He thought he just had a drinking problem. What he actually had was decades of toxic shame from a childhood he'd been quietly numbing out since he was 12. His biological father walked out when he was two. His stepdad drank red wine every night and became Simon's template f...

Sarah Drayge lost her dad Steve to alcoholism in 2017, exactly one week before his 60th birthday. She believes the shame and stigma around his disease kept him from getting the help that could have saved his life. In this episode of One for the Road, Sarah shares what it was like growing up with a father she adored, watching him slowly disappear into dependence after a life-changing trauma. She op...

Anita Chellamah was on Top of the Pops with Legs and Co. She fronted the rock band the Cherry Bombs, supported Poison on tour in America, and played the legendary CBGBs in New York. By 28 she was drinking champagne to start the night and Night Nurse to end it. Then in April 1988, she stopped. She has not had a drink or a drug since. That is 33 years of sobriety. In this conversation Anita tells Da...

Sean and Lee are brothers. They started in the City of London at 16. They sat next to each other on trading floors. They drank lunches at NatWest's wine bar. They earned big money and burned through it on red wine, hidden bottles, and eventually a pub fight that landed them on the front pages and almost in prison. Lee got sober in October 2014. Sean followed three months later, after collapsing on...

Vic Vanstone has been stealing wine since primary school. By 14 she was passed out in cider comas in farmers' fields. By her twenties she was around the world on the lash, chucked out of nightclubs, waking up in hotel rooms with strangers, and once blew her own finger off lighting a firework on the Millennium. She kept drinking through it all because she could not see herself outside the party. Th...

When most kids were saying they wanted to be doctors or firefighters, Josh Connolly used to say he just wanted to have kids and not be a drunk. He grew up walking on eggshells, hearing his mum scream "you'll wake the boys up" while everything got smashed up downstairs. He squeezed his eyes shut and learned to disappear. That trick got him through childhood. It also got him thrown out of every clas...

Terry Dunnage was 12 years old, locked in a bedroom for days at a time, talking to a plastic keyring he kept in a matchbox with a tissue for a blanket. That was his only friend for three years. At 28, his uncle walked into his kitchen with a jerry can of petrol and a yellow lighter. Terry survived 48 percent burns. While he was in a drug-induced coma, his daughter died. He woke up not knowing. Yea...

Denise Welch used to drink four or five bottles of wine in a night, get two hours of sleep and walk onto a TV set like nothing happened. She'd tell herself she was functioning. Inside, she was falling apart. In this episode, Denise sits down with Dave and tells the full story. A happy childhood in the North East. A wanted pregnancy at 31 that was followed by crippling postnatal depression nobody s...

William Porter woke up alone in his house with no memory of what happened. His wife had taken the kids and left during a five-day binge that started at a business lunch on a Tuesday. Her ultimatum was clear: stop drinking or I'm gone. She wasn't removing the wine from the house. This was his problem to fix. William spent his twenties binge drinking through the Parachute Regiment and a tour of Iraq...

Katie McNichol was a shot girl, a podium dancer, and the one who never said no to a night out. By her first year at university in Newcastle, she'd gone out 19 nights straight and ended up with alcohol poisoning. At 23, she did 100 days sober, including a girls' holiday to Palma completely alcohol-free, proving to herself she could do it. Then she went back to drinking for another 10 months. Her la...

Mark Adderley stood at the bar of his favourite pub staring at the taps, unable to order. Not because he was spoilt for choice. Because he didn't want any of it but wanted all of it. That moment became his altar. Mark grew up in chaotic 1970s London with a single mum who drank, used drugs, and came out as gay when he was seven. Left alone for huge stretches of childhood. By 14 he was drinking in p...

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.