It’s a year to the day since he stopped drinking, but John Robins has a hangover. It’s one to do with talking about alcohol, Robins says, rather than with drinking the stuff. But it’s not a metaphorical hangover, he insists. “It is a headache, it is a fuzzy head, it is tiredness, it is nausea.”
Every day since he started doing his stand-up show Howl at the Edinburgh Fringe in August he has been waking up feeling that way. That’s partly from the exhaustion of doing a deeply personal and — miraculously — deeply funny show about reaching the end of the road with a life of anxiety and alcoholism. And perhaps doing his job used to be as frazzling as this before, but all the booze-related hangovers were masking the emotional ones.
There is another thing, though. Robins talks with his customary crisp, affable articulacy, but he looks tired as we sit outdoors at a café in the London park where, at his lowest ebb, he told a friend he didn’t want to keep living. He has just come from Sheffield this morning, having performed his 12th touring show in 13 nights, while keeping up his popular weekly Radio 5 show with his friend and fellow comic Elis James.
Who booked that schedule? Turns out Robins did, ever the forward planner, before he gave up drinking for good in November last year. He’d arranged it that way because it meant 12 excuses to go to the pub after the show and drink. (Drinking always came after a show, never before or during.)
It is, I repeat, a funny show, as well as a revealing and intelligent look at anxiety and addiction. I have to reassure Robins, 41, of this several times as we talk, because it’s a show that takes its audience into some dark places. He has, I remind him, ensured that almost every observation ends on something funny. “It has to pass the comedy test,” he says. “But I also think you need to leave people, every so often, challenged or a little bit startled, maybe, before you release the tension with a laugh.”
It is an irony he acknowledges that, yes, the man whose work includes a podcast with James about mental health should have gone so deep into his own abyss. He thought drinking was managing his anxiety rather than, as he later concluded, fuelling it. Then, at 2am on November 6 last year, he woke up and realised enough was enough. “I’d just run out of steam with everything. With my constant anxiety and fear and self-pity and dread.” He looked for the first podcast he could find with “sobriety” in its name. “And within about a minute I was like, ‘Yeah, this is where I need to be.’”
For about five or six years he had tried moderating his drinking, ensuring he had two dry nights a week and monitoring his intake with spreadsheets. Yes, spreadsheets. This is very John Robins. The other five nights, though, were thirsty affairs: a bottle of wine or five or six pints of beer. “If a normal person were to start drinking six pints a night their partner might go: ‘What has happened to you?’ But that was my moderation.” In his final year of drinking even that much restraint “went out of the window”.
Robins hasn’t had a proper holiday for seven years (he hopes to correct that next year). Instead, drinking sessions were his mini-breaks. “It made me hard to be around because my thing was to go quiet or isolate. I’d be impatient with people.” If for any reason a show began late, perhaps because — ironically — audience members were still in the bar, Robins would get in a grump because he could see his post-show drinking time receding. Hence he took pains, when planning this tour, to ensure that almost every show began at 7.30pm rather than 8pm. More drinking time. “I’m glad to be home early, but I’m a sober guy performing a drunkard’s tour schedule.”
If he couldn’t drink in a pub he’d drink at home or in hotel rooms. He knows he’s not the only one who does this. It can be a lonely job. “I was chatting to another comic about this, about filling the bath in your hotel room with water to keep your cans cold for when you got back. It’s such a bleak image. But I get this sort of euphoric recall about a guy in a Travelodge fishing cans of Guinness out of his bath. It’s pathetic, but a part of my brain goes: ‘Those were the good times.’”
This year, at his first sober Edinburgh Fringe, he was astonished with how little other people seemed to be drinking. “And then I thought, no, people have always drunk like that. You were just surrounding yourself with people who were getting hammered, like you.”
Robins performing in Edinburgh this year
GETTY IMAGES
He finds it liberating yet taxing to talk about his old self on stage with such self-lacerating candour. Once before, when he toured the show that won him the 2017 Edinburgh Comedy award (jointly with Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette) — a show about the state he was in after his break-up with his fellow comedian Sara Pascoe — he found himself having to marinate nightly in a misery that in real life he was ready to move on from. That’s the case now too. “Constantly going back to that old headspace is useful but exhausting.” He is looking forward to the remaining month of the tour, but can’t imagine doing the material beyond that.
“I think this show is about as far as I can take it, in stand-up, of delaying laughs alongside more reflective or serious bits.” He is aware that, owing to the success of his shows with James, now more than ever he has a loyal fanbase. They may not know what they’ve let themselves in for. “I’ve never had such goodwill behind me when I go on stage. It’s incredible. And I’m so lucky. But I do fear that the cheer at the end is slightly quieter than the one at the start.”
• John Robins: Howl review — addiction, death and top-class comedy
At which point I have to remind him again how funny Howl can be. But on reflection Robins knows he has come up with the show he wanted to do. He suggests that the next one will be lighter. Or he will find somewhere dramatic to put his thoughts on addiction and recovery — he is in a 12-step programme and has been investigating Buddhism. Since this year’s Edinburgh Fringe he has a new girlfriend, the actress Francesca Knight. He is, he hopes, a better partner for learning — tricky one for a comic, this — that he is not the centre of the universe; that he does not — tricky one for someone with control issues, this — have to come up with solutions all the time.
He grew up in Thornbury, 12 miles north of Bristol, the younger child of a mother who worked as a counsellor and yoga teacher, and a father who worked in aeronautics. His sister is a paediatric nurse (“so she does proper work”). At Oxford, where he studied English, he didn’t perform but was in charge of the bar at the student union. He didn’t consider stand-up until he went to his first comedy gig, aged 23, while he was working at a bookshop and taking a year off drinking. The next week he did his first open-mike slot.
He’d never quite been in control of booze, he thinks now. He remembers being on a scout camp at 13 and talking one of the leaders into giving him some beer from their stash. Instead of taking it to share with his fellow scouts he walked out of the camp and took it with him onto a hill. “And so drank it while watching the scout camp go on at a distance. That’s someone who’s got a romantic relationship with alcohol — I want it on my own, I want to be away from everyone, I want to savour it — so I think I was born with whatever it is I’ve got. I know not everyone agrees.”
“How can I say something incredibly serious, even disturbing, and then make people laugh?”
CHRIS MCANDREW FOR THE TIMES
After that first performance slowly he prospered. He and James have been on the radio together since 2014, initially for the station X (formerly XFM), and with the BBC since 2019. As a stand-up he got his biggest boost when at the Fringe in 2017 he and Pascoe each did shows based on their reactions to the end of their four-year relationship. Pascoe became the more famous of the two, but it was Robins who won that year’s Edinburgh Comedy award
They couldn’t see each other’s shows at the time. Robins still hasn’t seen hers. He assumes she hasn’t seen his. Still, after his big win they had a glass of wine together and took a photograph. “We thought about putting it on Instagram and saying: ‘Haha, it was all a trick.’ We were able to laugh about that sort of thing.”
He lives in Buckinghamshire, or does when he isn’t tearing around the country to do shows every night. He is learning how to tour without “those little islands of calm, solace, obliteration, whatever it is” that alcohol used to give him. Now he has to try other tricks: meditation, music, writing in a journal, connecting with people — “all these things that are more rewarding, but more difficult”.
At which point I suggest that this piece may need one last repetition that, honestly, he makes this stuff funny. He laughs. “There’s no escaping the fact that it’s serious stuff. But that’s always been what’s got me going. How can I say something incredibly serious, even disturbing, and then make people laugh? I’d like to think I’m successful at it more often than I fail.”
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In real life, the photo does look like he’s got some colour though.
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