Broadcaster Iain Lee has opened up about his addictions to drugs and alcohol, describing how at the height of his fame in the 1990s he was ‘fuelled by fear and cocaine’.
He said he first started drinking at the age of 15, and was soon sneaking bottles of alcohol into school and experiencing blackouts. He later experimented with other drugs, trying cocaine shortly before landing his breakthrough TV role as host of The 11 O’Clock Show on Channel 4. Suddenly famous and well paid, he said he smoked ‘tonnes of weed’ and took ‘loads of cocaine’ during his time on the show, partly to hide his own extreme insecurity.
Lee was speaking on the fifth episode of Listen UP, an addiction recovery-themed podcast from Abbeycare, one of the UK’s leading residential rehabilitation centres.
The broadcaster, who also appeared on I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! in 2017, spent time at Abbeycare’s clinic in Gloucestershire in December 2020 after having suicidal thoughts, but has since maintained his recovery and now works as a counsellor.
During his appearance on the podcast, released today, Lee said he had experienced sexual abuse during his childhood, growing up on an estate in Slough. He was bullied at school and told by one teacher he was ‘one of the worst children they’d ever seen’, turning to alcohol at the age of 15 partly as a form of escape.
Speaking about the first time he drank, he told the podcast’s host Eddie Clarke, ‘I felt how I imagined a normal person would feel: confident, sexy, funny – and that was the start of the illness.
‘I loved it. I felt so good drinking. I didn’t get a hangover that first time, and I remember thinking, I want to do this for the rest of my life.’
He soon began smoking marijuana, and later at university tried speed, acid, ecstasy, and then cocaine, spending the money he earned from comedy gigs or acting jobs on drugs.
He recalled, ‘Shortly after trying cocaine, I got my first job on the television. I got The 11 O’Clock Show, and it’s the late 90s, and suddenly I’m earning a lot of money. I’ve gone from signing on, living at my mum’s, to earning a lot of money. I went nuts. It was inevitable I would go nuts. Suddenly I was earning thousands of pounds a week, you know, and people would deliver cocaine to me.
‘I was allergic to fame, because I still thought I was this ugly, talentless kid that didn’t deserve any form of success. So to hide that insecurity and that fear, I took more cocaine… it very quickly became literally insane. It became psychosis. I was full of fear and low self-esteem.
‘There’s no two ways about it – I became a thoroughly unpleasant person to work with, fuelled by fear and cocaine, a really, really bad combination. I became everything I didn’t want to be.’
Listen UP features a new guest each month who is invited to talk about their first-hand experience of addiction and recovery. It aims to reduce the stigma around drug and alcohol addiction through honest conversations, as well as demonstrating that recovery is possible.
Lee described how his addictions led him to walk out on the fifth season of the The 11 O’Clock Show days before it was due to air, despite being offered a fee of £3,000 an episode. He later started attending Narcotics Anonymous meetings, initially hating the experience but eventually coming to rely heavily on them to maintain his abstinence.
‘The guy next to me was a rock star, the guy next to me was a homeless bloke. And that for me summed up recovery – no-one is safe from this disease,’ he said. ‘You can be a multi-millionaire, you can be literally sleeping on the street, as this guy had been. But the disease doesn’t care.’
His message to others going through similar experiences is simple: ‘Talk to people, talk to people, talk to people. The addiction is a disease of isolation, it wants us on our own in a corner of a room. Don’t listen to that. Speak to someone.’
Eddie Clarke, outreach manager at Abbeycare and the host of Listen UP, said, ‘I remember watching Iain on TV when I was growing up. Talking to him now and hearing what he was really going through at the height of his fame was an extraordinary experience. His story shows that even those who appear to be enjoying great success in their careers can still be struggling with unaddressed and potentially devastating addictions.
‘Given the levels of alcohol and drug-related harm across the UK, it’s more important than ever that we talk honestly about addiction, and that is what our podcast does.
‘We hope that Iain’s brutally honest reflections on his life and career will be heard by others who are going through the same thing, helping them realise that they are far from alone.’
The Listen UP podcast can be found here
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