John Robins on addiction, comedy and Taskmaster

John Robins has opened up about his struggles with gambling and alcohol addiction – and how comedy helped him deal with it.

He said stand-up – like his previous addictions – could be a way of avoiding confronting his genuine feeling.. but in a much healthier way.

His comments come on a new podcast, Hold Or Fold, created by the Prison Radio Association to discuss the devastating impact of problem gambling.

Robins told hosts Ben Jones and Steve Girling- both of whom have first-hand experience of gambling addiction and imprisonment - that he started playing fruit machines when he was ‘bout 16, not hugely happy in my life’.

He said: ‘I know now looking back, I've always been desperate to change the way I feel… someone described it recently like as being allergic to yourself. So, anything that gives me a chance to just switch my head off or to escape or to feel different is very, very attractive. 

‘Obviously I knew as a teenager that alcohol changed the way you felt, but I was just bored in a pub and I put a quid in a fruit machine. Instantly, I had found something that just switched off my head. It stopped me thinking about anything else. It consumed me.

‘And 18 months later, I was in the car park at that same pub, sat outside smashing a pint glass, cutting my wrists because it got so desperate. It was such an acute, such a sudden, all-encompassing problem that I don't really have a great deal of memories from that time aside from gambling.

‘One of the awful things about gambling is I think more than almost any other addiction, it's isolating because you're so ashamed to tell anyone else what you're doing and what you've done. You're too embarrassed to face up yourself to the amount of money you've lost. You're desperately trying to solve the situation. Just get back to zero. 

‘You never get back to zero because it's not actually about money, even though money is the form it takes. It's about switching your head off and that comes at a cost. If I win, I want to carry on switching my head off. So winning money just buys me more time to do that.

‘When I admitted my problem to her, my mum sorted out some counselling and whilst that was useful, it didn't stop me gambling. I went to a Gambler's Anonymous meeting and then I went to university and I relapsed. 

‘It was not a huge period in my life in terms of time. It was probably from my first bet to my last bet. It was probably only three or four years, but that's the terrifying thing about gambling. You can spend all the money you got in a day, let alone three or four years.

‘I've not had a bet in probably 20 years, but not long after that alcohol took over. Only looking back now do I realise they were performing the same function. But alcohol is so much more socially acceptable that it took a lot longer to see the damage alcohol was doing to me physically and mentally.’

‘Every addict, regardless of the addiction, becomes an expert in hiding it, whether that's drinking, drugs, gambling, sex, spending money, food, whatever it is. 

People who haven’t experienced addiction might think people who have addictions are weak willed. Nothing could be further from the case. The amount of effort, the amount of concentration and management it takes to live in addiction is off the scale. You know, if you think about a gambler maybe managing 10, 20 online accounts, the cards, the lying, the compartmentalisation of their life, making sure no one finds out, it's a full-time job. 

‘And on top of that, you might have a family, you might have a job, you might have other responsibilities. It takes an incredible effort just to keep an addiction up. Do you know what I mean? If you were to talk about transferable skills, it would be quite an incredible CV. 

Hiding it becomes part of the course, part of the territory. And it means that when you finally have to share that with someone, the shock of them finding out – it could be your partner, it could be someone you've been married to for 20 years. You suddenly say, "I don't own the house any more", "I'm 100 grand in debt".  whatever it is – imagine dropping out on someone's doorstep. No wonder people keep it to themselves. 

‘But the problem will only go away when you start to bring people in to your head and into the situation you're in. It's not going to get better by keeping it to yourself. You're not going to solve this problem alone. Addiction wants you alone. Doesn't matter whether it's drugs, alcohol or gambling.’

‘I see this as me being very lucky, but it was pre-internet… If I'd been able to do it on my phone, I guarantee I would be dead by now. I just it would all gone. I'm bad enough with an iPhone game. I have to delete them all because I just I'm addicted to switching my head off. It's too powerful a thing for me.

‘Admitting  the same with alcohol, admitting that it was more powerful than me, that was the doorway to getting free of it.’

Robins first got into comedy when he was living in Bristol and working in a bookshop and ‘feeling pretty low about things’. 

He knew he was. drinking ‘way too much’ and decided to give up alcohol for Lent, recalling how he was in a pub and  downed a pint of Guinness and a shot of whisky just before the midnight deadline for his abstinence to start ‘and I was immediately sick into my mouth in what turned out to be someone else's wedding reception’.

‘Anyway, what then happened was that next week, to keep myself occupied, I did something which I'd been thinking about for a while, which was do my first stand-up performance. It was an open mic night and there was a listing in the local magazine. I called up and they gave me a 10-minute spot. 

‘From that moment on, I was kind of hooked, really. Looking back now, it was giving me something to do without drinking. And it became this huge adrenaline rush every week. And then I found out that you could actually get paid for doing it, which blew my mind. From that moment on, that was in 2005 and I've been doing it ever since.’

Speaking as how he sees comedy as a similar, if healthier, way of coping with life, he said: ‘'Humour is a defence mechanism, though, definitely, and it's a way of coping. It's a way of surviving in difficult situations. It's a way of breaking tension. It's a way of deflecting sometimes from how you're feeling. 

'If you make a joke about it, hope the conversation moves on. It can be a way of attacking people. It can be a way of attacking yourself. Humour is a tool that can serve you in difficult situations. 

‘For me, any addiction, and I've had a couple, is about changing the way you feel. And laughter is a way of changing the way you feel. It's a really good, really healthy way of changing the way you feel. I don't know the science behind it, but I'm sure lots of chemicals get fired around the body when you're laughing, having a giggle with your mates or whatever.

‘ Add that to adrenaline that you get from being on stage, nerves. I was able to replace a lot of those hits I was getting from alcohol with performing. It's a way of forcing yourself to think about what you think about the world as well. And it's a way of being creative without having to worry too much about writing, which is quite nice. So, I'm sure lots of people do it for lots of different reasons.

‘For me, I got addicted to that feeling of making people laugh. And that's one of my healthy addictions, I suppose.’

Robins also spoke about addressing increasing dark areas in his comedy, saying: ‘What interests me about stand-up increasingly over the years is how can I say something to an audience which is really, really bleak and then make them laugh? My most recent show is about stopping drinking again… almost 20 years after the first time I stopped. And, you know, I wanted to die. I was I was ready to drink myself to death. 

‘But you can't just say that to an audience without following it up with something funny. And it's nice to know when you're making a room feel really quite uneasy to know in about two seconds’ time, I'm going to have them in fits of laughter. That's a real buzz. 

‘It's nice to know that you're perhaps talking about things that other people wouldn't talk about in comedy. I think it's really important when we're talking about these things to bring a light-hearted feel to it, because otherwise it's just too earnest. 

‘The situations we get ourselves into as horrible as they are sometimes funny.  I's important to have both that light and the shade when you're talking about difficult things.’

Robins also spoke of getting over his addictions, and praised the work of Gambler's Anonymous. 

He said: ‘Having lived in a world where no one else understood what I was going through, no one else knew what I was going through, to be able to step into a room where every single person knew exactly what it was like living in my head, knew exactly the sorts of things I'd done, knew the situations I got myself into, and also appreciated the power of it and how effective it was at serving a purpose. I just don't know how you'd do it without that because the community of those people. 

‘I can tell some of my darkest secrets to a complete stranger in those rooms. They'll go,"I know exactly what you mean. I've done exactly the same.".’

And he said he now never wagers money on anything, whether it be an office sweepstake or even a pound on a pub quiz, saying: ‘The first bet I ever laid, a pound in a fruit machine, you used to get five spins for a pound. So, the first bet I ever laid was 20p. That ended up with me sitting in a car park with blood all over my wrists. There is no harmless bet because 20p got me to my lowest ebb.’

• Subscribe to the Hold Or Fold podcast here

• Robins has previously spoken about his addiction to promote the National Gambling Helpline, which is on 0808 8020 133. The service is free, confidential, and open 24 hours a day.​ Drinkline, the national alcohol helpline, is free on 0300 123 1110 (weekdays 9am to 8pm, weekends 11am to 4pm).

Published: 4 Mar 2025