John Humphrys has revealed that he was visibly drunk while broadcasting live for the BBC the night Richard Nixon resigned as US president in 1974 — an on-air humiliation that the veteran journalist has now described as the moment he effectively quit drinking for good.
The 82-year-old broadcaster, who went on to become one of Britain’s most formidable interviewers across three decades on Radio 4’s Today programme and as host of Mastermind, spoke candidly about his relationship with alcohol in a new interview with The Times — admitting that he may well have been an alcoholic during his early years at the corporation.
Humphrys had joined the BBC in 1966, initially as a district reporter in Liverpool before becoming the corporation’s youngest-ever foreign television correspondent. He reported the resignation of Richard Nixon in 1974 on television by satellite from the United States — but the circumstances surrounding that broadcast, he has now confessed, were rather less professional than they appeared.
He told The Times that earlier in that August day he had done his “usual” and gone for a “very, very, very lavish lunch,” consuming martinis, wine and brandy before staggering back to the Washington bureau to discover that Nixon was about to resign and that a satellite had been booked. His broadcast assistant confronted him: “Are you sober?” When he replied dismissively, she told him simply: “You’ve got to get on.” He got through the broadcast — barely. The following day, his assistant delivered a stark message from London: “You can’t do that again.”
“I got through it. I didn’t fall off the chair, but it was painfully obvious I was pissed,” Humphrys told The Times. “That was the last time ever.”
The revelation is particularly striking given the weight of the story he had been sent to cover. Nixon’s resignation on 8 August 1974 — the first and only time an American president has resigned from office — was one of the defining news events of the twentieth century, the culmination of the Watergate scandal that had consumed US politics for two years.
Humphrys told the paper he believed he may have been an alcoholic, though he qualified the claim by acknowledging the difficulty of knowing whether one genuinely needs alcohol or simply wants it. The decision to stop drinking entirely was accelerated by personal history: both his grandfather and his uncle had died from alcoholism. He went cold turkey. In a 2006 interview with The Telegraph, he said bluntly that he “wouldn’t be here if I had carried on drinking.”
Today, Humphrys — who now presents a regular show on Classic FM — takes a far more moderate approach. “Most evenings with supper, if I’m by myself, I will have half a pint of beer, but half of that will be non-alcoholic beer. So I virtually don’t drink at all,” he told The Times.
Humphrys left Radio 4’s Today programme in September 2019 after 32 years at the helm, during which he built a formidable reputation as one of the most tenacious political interviewers in British broadcasting history. He subsequently left Mastermind in 2021. The Washington incident, hidden for five decades, now emerges as one of the more extraordinary footnotes to a remarkable career.
If you or someone you know is struggling with alcohol addiction, you can call the national Drinkline helpline confidentially on 0300 123 1110.
