Vicky Pattison is a reality television star who first made her name in Geordie Shore 12 years ago at the age of 23, and the daughter of an alcoholic father. She doesn’t think she is an alcoholic herself, “but I do think I have a problem with drink, and I have abused it in the past.” Watching her drunk self on the show for the first time now brings her out in a cold sweat.
What follows in her Channel 4 documentary, Alcohol, Dad and Me, is a deeply personal, very moving untangling of the part booze played in her upbringing. It looks at what it means to her now – and the slippery definitions of “problematic drinking” versus full-blown alcoholism – and what it means to be the adult child of a man now left by his wife of 30 years and unable to stop drinking.
