26 May 2022
We’re thrilled to announce that we will publish broadcaster and columnist Adrian Chiles’ The Good Drinker: How I Learned to Love Drinking Less on 6th October 2022. The book grew out of Chiles’ BBC2 documentary, Drinkers Like Me, in which he explored his own – and Britain’s – drinking culture. We have bought World rights from Avalon.
There’s an awful lot of advice out there on how to quit booze completely. If you just want to drink a bit less, the pickings are slim. Yet while the alcohol industry depends on a minority of problem drinkers, the majority really do drink well below the recommended weekly alcohol limit. What’s their secret? In The Good Drinker, the inimitable Adrian Chiles sets out around Britain and plumbs his only slightly fuzzy memories of a lifetime in pubs in a quest to discover the unsung pleasures of drinking in moderation. He writes: ‘This book definitely isn’t some covert guide to knocking drinking on the head completely. Neither is it a classic self-help book; it might amount to the same thing, but it’s really just a distillation, if you’ll pardon the pun, of the many things I’ve learnt about drinking less since I made a TV documentary on the subject and started writing about it. And what I’ve learnt, you’ll be shocked to read, is that it’s complicated.’
Profile Editor Mark Ellingham says: ‘Adrian’s book is an eye-opener. It’s for all of us – about 20 percent of the population – who drink more than we should, but don’t think we have a problem. We wake up in our own beds. We don’t get into fights. But drink is all too much of a constant in our social lives. Adrian loves drinking and doesn’t want to stop. Most of us feel like that and his book will help set many of us on the path to some kind of moderation. And it’s pure Chiles: full of good sense, companionable and never remotely preachy. It is a book people will keep reading for many years.’
Adrian Chiles hosts Chiles on Friday on 5Live. He co-presented both The One Show and Daybreak, and was for five years the chief presenter for ITV Sport’s football coverage. He writes a regular column in both the Guardian and the Sun, which not many people can claim. His previous book, We Don’t Know What We’re Doing, was about obsessive West Bromwich Albion fans. He has hosted an array of documentaries for the BBC, including Drinkers Like Me (2018) and Panorama – Britain’s Drinking Problem (2020).