Alan Carr: There used to be a time I’d have martinis. Now it’s Gaviscon

It is also unusually and refreshingly unsparing for a celebrity memoir. He shines a spotlight on his relationship with Drayton, a sometime actor and estate agent, whom he met at a birthday party eight years ago. It’s clearly a union that is loving and harsh. Carr describes a drinking spree that ended in a fight, a fancy dress party that ended in a spinal injury, and the sudden realisation that, while Carr was away touring his stand-up show Yap Yap Yap, Drayton’s drinking had become a real problem. The book contains the heartbreaking sentence: “I used to only kiss him so I could tell if there was alcohol on his lips.”

“I know, I know,” says Carr, doing that eye-roll of his that manages to be both comical and confiding. “I showed him the alcoholism bit, and he wanted me to go deeper and darker, into the really grim time, because he’s out the other side now.”

Drayton would hide his drinking in a way that might seem funny if it weren’t so sad — fetching logs for their fire one at a time, so he could take nips from a bottle hidden in a welly in the shed. “The deceit is the worst thing,” Carr says. “When you say you live with an alcoholic, they imagine Patsy from Ab Fab, but it’s not fabulous at all.”

He ended up putting Drayton through rehab, and blames himself to an extent for his illness. He feels he should have put a brake on the hedonism they shared in the early years of their relationship, and perhaps quit the tour when things got bad. “But it was going so well, they kept adding extra dates and I just saw pound signs,” he says. “Not in a greedy way; I was feathering our nest, doing it for both of us.” Post-rehab Drayton has set up a horse sanctuary in the country. Neither he nor Carr has totally given up booze, but now they can “just have one”.

Drayton proposed in Lombok in September by popping a ring into Carr’s pudding. Typically, Carr bit it, thought he’d lost a crown, then listened in embarrassment as the staff of the hotel sang the only line they knew of Can You Feel the Love Tonight to them, over and over again. “It was very tense,” Carr says, giggling.

Having never wanted to wed, he realised that marrying would be “an act of defiance because it’s been such a horrible year; you’ve got gays being stabbed in Bangladesh, the Orlando shooting. I’m not going all Emmeline Pankhurst, but you start thinking about where you are in society, what can you do.”

Carr is engaged to Paul Drayton, an actor and estate agent

DOUG PETERS/PA

Wedding plans are at an early stage. “I like the idea of me and Paul just disappearing off, but I think people who know me want Elton John and David Furnish,” Carr says. “We do throw a good party, and I’m sure there will be costume changes. One day I think ‘register office’, the next I think ‘maybe Longleat with hippos and a lion coming with a ring on its head’.”

His anxiety attacks have abated slightly since he wrote about them in the book. He did feel “a sense of impending doom” on his 40th birthday this year and spent it crying and drinking. “But I opened one eye the morning after, and nothing had fallen off, nothing had prolapsed.”

That said, he still suffers from self-esteem issues, “and I have a love-hate relationship with my face and my body”, a hangover from childhood. He grew up in Northampton, where his father, a former football player, was the manager of Nuneaton and then Northampton FC. “So I had everything thrown at me,” he says. “You are a fat goofy gay and your dad’s the manager of the team; so if they lost I’d get, ‘Your dad’s shit, couldn’t score in a brothel’, and I didn’t even give a shit about football.” However, his was a loving family, and although he had “peaks and troughs” in his childhood he came through it all right, and has some sympathy with those who bullied him. “Obviously no one deserves to be bullied, and this sounds awful, but I do get it, because I was annoying and I do have this voice.”

He can’t change the voice, and wouldn’t have his teeth done, or a hair transplant because that wouldn’t really be him. He has started going to a personal trainer to lose weight, but also because years of walking effeminately have given him “mincer’s hip”. “In the Eighties you are told it’s Aids that is going to cause the trouble, and it turns out it’s mincing,” he says. “And you will never guess what I’ve got now, acid reflux. The ear, nose and throat man — I don’t know if he was being homophobic or just good at his job — said, ‘I could tell by the way you walk that you had a good gag reflex.’

“But it’s another reason to cut down on booze. Used to be a time I’d have espresso martinis. Now I have Gaviscon. But with an olive. Shaken not stirred. Hahaha.”
Alanatomy (Michael Joseph) is out now. Alan Carr’s Christmas Chatty Man is on Channel 4 on Christmas Day at 10.30pm; Alan Carr’s New Year Specstacular is on New Year’s Eve at 9pm

Alan Carr’s perfect weekend

Pilates or personal trainer?
Personal trainer — I do Pilates to sort my hip out, but it doesn’t shift any weight and it gives me wind

Owl or lark?
Owl

Wine or water?
Wine

Strictly or X Factor?
I’ll say Strictly

Radio 4 or Radio 1?
Radio 1

Theresa May or Jeremy Corbyn?
Look at the shit Kate Bush got when she said something . . . I’ll say Monster Raving Loony Party

I couldn’t get through the weekend without . . .
Gaviscon