The truth about Adrian Chiles

A semi-deep dive into the columns of the Guardian's avuncular king of cosy whimsy

When you’re reading a regular column, you’re buying into a personality. Whether it’s always written by the same journo, or one with a specific theme but a rotation of authors, it’s not just about what’s being said, but the way they’re saying it. It’s why columnists are so revered – and potentially dangerous – and successful formats run for years. Readers return time and time again for their favourite column’s take on what’s happening in the world. They may be looking for reassurance, or clarification, or they may love to slate them, but there are few greater honours in journalism than a readership eager to hear your thoughts. No columnist or format is likely as powerful as they think they are, but a regular column is a platform like no other, standing out from the (largely) factual concerns of reporting, and offering a (mostly) human touch.

Word c0unt is a semi-deep dive into or, perhaps, a review of a different regular column in every edition, whether linked by having the same author or being part of a franchise. I’m looking for your suggestions on what to cover in future editions (leave a comment or contact me), but in this first one, we’re looking at the king of cosy columnising, Adrian Chiles.

Were you to judge Adrian Chiles solely on his TV presenting output and, from your initial impressions, rank him on how annoying he might be to be stuck in a lift with, you might place him somewhere between one of the former Top Gear presenters who isn’t Jeremy Clarkson – sorry I have limited capacity for learning straight men’s names – and Bungle from Rainbow.

His range is admirable, stretching from presenting business and money shows in his early career, helming football coverage, and gamely switching tone at lightning pace on unpredictable, hysterical magazine flagship The One Show. He projects a persona of a clearly intelligent, if slightly bewildered, uncle who once spent an hour trapped in a highchair after trying to assemble it in a Harvester. He’s real, a man’s man, but not devoid of sensitivity – he welled up during his last ever One Show but that may have come from the realisation he’d now have to get up at 3am every day to present ITV’s ill-fated Daybreak.

While fairly prolific in his TV presenting career, Adrian was fairly easy to avoid, and I had no impression of him whatsoever from the brief seconds I’d see his face before flicking over to something else. Then I started seeing him in the pub round the corner from where my boyfriend lived at the time, but I won’t say where because maybe he still goes there and he seemed pleasant enough. But as all cosy figures of the mainstream must if they wish to survive, Chiles has gathered something of a cult following thanks to his regular column in the Guardian. After writing a couple of pieces about his drinking – he had a bit of a problem, which he’s also written a book about – Chiles’s musings went weekly in February 2019, his online archives now reaching fifteen pages, months and months of often thought-provoking deluxe whimsy.

While I wouldn’t want to dim Adrian’s bulb, his knack for regularly going viral is perhaps a result of the Guardian headline writers’ gleeful mischief than the content of his columns. On first read, they look like they’ve been conjured up by a bot trying to write a Stan Barstow novel using only content cribbed from Yours magazine, the Smash Hits Yearbook 1989 and Smiths’ lyrics.

A small selection:

– Karl Lagerfeld sent me 50 roses – I don’t think he’d ever met a large Brummie
– At Easter I had a fall. The wild garlic smelled lovely, but I didn’t want to die there
– I took drugs recently and colours danced on the insides of my eyelids
– I adore dogs, so why does their unconditional love make me nervous?
– I thought it was weird to have a favourite spoon. Then I realised I wasn’t alone …
– I have a urinal in my flat and it has changed my life – so why are people appalled?

And of course the recent hit that caused the internet to lose the final vestigial crumbs of its mind:
– We can go to the moon – so why can’t we stop my glasses sliding down my nose?

Plus, its recent sequel, following up on scores of readers mansplaining his own spectacles to him:

– Thanks to you, my glasses no longer slip down my nose. If only it didn’t hurt too much to wear them

Adrian’s columns really took off in lockdown, when most of us were slowly going round the twist from boredom, or fear, or fury, or a combination of all three. Spending the height of the pandemic with Adrian was like watching an uncle (again) go slightly mad as they first realised that going to the supermarket every day was now their entire personality, before embracing the life-changing freedom this supposed lack of responsibilities offered. In the last year, as the world’s returned to its pre-pandemic energy, Chiles’s columns have become more introspective. He has a talent for looking at the world with genuine wonder, although he’s fond of a bathetic slam back down to earth by lamenting past deeds done, opportunities missed, and his own mortality.

Mostly, his columns are barely 400 words – you could transcribe them onto the condensation of a window on a frosty morning – but on the imperative issues, Chiles is allowed to expand. And thank goodness he does. A lo-fi meltdown about the uselessness of self checkout machines was given room to breathe as Adrian ramps up the anxiety and loathing as he loiters in a snaking post office queue:

‘When my turn at the counter arrived, I remarked, imaginatively, that it was a busy morning.’

I pray every night to deities I don’t believe in for even a nanoscopic percentage of his self-awareness.

Adrian Chiles is, unquestionably, funny, and while he may be painted by social media’s apparent intelligentsia as the kind of bumbling idiot who’d dodder into an ante room at Downing Street and accidentally press the nuclear button, he knows exactly what he’s doing, and who he’s speaking to. The upper reaches of Generation X who perhaps feel a little lost now they must no longer act as personal cabbie to their effervescent teenage offspring, pulling on the novelty Christmas jumpers they swore they’d never wear, reluctantly exiting the ‘mature up-for-it crowd’ stage of middle age. In fact, Chiles has a column for that:

How do I know middle age is at an end? I fell over in the bath

There is an amiable sweetness to his writing. I can imagine his children’s eyes lighting up with adoration as he opened his Christmas presents and pretended to enjoy whatever they’d scooped into their arms from the remnants of the Boots 3 for 2 at 3:55pm on Christmas Eve.

Indeed, in ‘So many unwanted Christmas gifts remain gathering dust – but binning them just fills me with guilt’, I was surprised to find Adrian and I have more in common than the sexier, slightly cooler version of me from 2012 would care to admit. I too feel enormous guilt about not liking gifts and would, ideally, prefer not to receive them. I don’t like to think of people agonising over what to get me – ‘You’re hard to buy for,’ I am told every December – and I hate prescriptive present buying, bartering for the contents of your Christmas lists. I've just come round to gift cards, which I previously decried as lacking imagination, because who am I to deny the underrated pleasure of buying something for somebody else and showing you have, for a moment at least, thought of them? I save them up for as long as I can until I really need them, which is how I managed to buy my new laptop after my old one unexpectedly went bye-bye just before Christmas. Adrian’s dilemma saw a friend gift him an engraver he had no need of; he talks of this awkwardness with the same reverence a Brontë character might speak of a beautiful young wife recently dead of consumption:

‘In the end, she took it away and it has not been spoken of since. The guilt is terrible.’

Po-et-ry, baby.

Emotional touchpoints get the deftest of taps. He speaks fondly of his parents and children, and his mother’s homeland, Croatia, see the wonderfully headlined ‘Croatia has enchanting words for genitalia. Why doesn't the UK?’ among many others. In the column on Christmas gifts, he affectionately recounts his mum buying useful stocking fillers like string and sellotape. Sometimes his words are rosy-hued reminisces but often they’re a postcard to his youthful, ungrateful self, reaching through time in the hope of making that past version realise how lucky he was. Most of us try the same at some point, but we can’t cross the dimensions – the life lessons can only be applied now. However, he’s also admitted elsewhere that until the lockdown it wasn’t unusual for him to cart his laundry up to the aforementioned mother for a ‘maternal flattening’, so perhaps we shouldn’t nominate him for son of the year just yet.

As well as comedic respite, Chiles’s columns serve as confessionals. He talks unflinchingly about his ADD diagnosis and his anxiety medication. And dare I say he has wisdom to impart too? In ‘Wise words? The advice that I can't forget’ Chiles reveals that at university, when vexed at forgetting his sponge and regretting a lather-free shower, he was advised by a classmate to… no, I really am going to type this… work up the shower gel into a lather using, uh, his pubic hair instead. After forgetting my own sponge, back in my hometown for Christmas, I’m both mortified and thrilled to report that this works. Perhaps the best argument ever for not brazilianing everything off in your private areas. Chiles also has a top tip for insomnia, listening to ‘pub chatter’ on Spotify, a use for droning pub bores at last. One thing he doesn’t really talk about much, but is often mentioned whenever his column goes live, is that his wife is Guardian editor-in-chief Kath Viner. Does this make Adrian a nepo daddy? Not quite – the relationship, apparently, only began after the column was established.

Chiles is in his mid-fifties, so, along with the bons mots, we must take some good old-fashioned bafflement at the world. In ‘When did everything become “awesome” and “amazing"? I blame the Americans’ we see Adrian grappling with language evolving before his eyes. Is he right about the pervasive ‘thank you so much’ being a desperate Americanism? I’d assumed it was used to differentiate from the somewhat staid ‘thank you very much’, which now sounds arch and sarcastic, as if you’re cosplaying the true icon of passive aggression – another overused word, ‘icon’ and its adjective cousin ‘iconic’ – Margo Leadbetter from The Good Life.

‘Is it my age?’ cries Adrian as he struggles to get to grips with infinity pools in ‘Why would anyone want their own pool? They’re certainly no good for swimming in’. It is, perhaps, a sign of age to attribute importance to something only if it has a purpose or a function, to cast aside frivolity – but it may also be a man thing. Many men give up reading fiction post-40 because they don’t see the point in reading material that isn’t factual and thus life-enhancing in some way. Knowledge, as we’re always told, is power, but what about fun? And entertainment? Are they not powerful in their own way, allowing us to explore less serious aspects of our personality, to uncover the truth about others by observing how they choose to spend leisure time? And while he may have a point that most homes in the UK definitely don’t ‘need’ a pool, small unnavigable hotel pools do actually have a function – they’re for cooling off, floating on, flirting in. Some people look absolutely gorgeous wet (many of us don’t, however). Water has a calming effect too, and staring out of the side of an infinity pool at a sumptuous vista is a deluxe amniotic experience. It’s the same reason we love hot tubs, plunge pools and even foot spas – our bodies feel other-worldly when part-submerged. Unless we’re lifeguards or Tom Daley, to have your body enveloped by water means you’re not working, you're out of your regular daily space. You are other, you are free, your body is being kneaded and licked at by a strange clear force. You are aqua now. Get with the program on that, Ade.

He may not be overly political and certainly not in thrall to the discourse but Adrian has an eye for highlighting the smaller, everyday problems that blight our lives. He’s perhaps the everyman ambassador we need for getting sh•t done. The confusing crapness and unhelpfulness of online reviews, the fact we ignore depression in older people, how it should be okay to cry in public, and, best of all, the absolute hellmouth that is any toilet in a service station:

I saw something in a petrol station toilet southbound on the M1 in the east Midlands on Monday afternoon that I can never unsee

What’s really missing, however, is Adrian himself illustrating every column. An unchanging byline pic and the obligatory ‘posed by model’ stock shot of someone who was vaguely attractive at school will not do. I want a fresh photo shoot for every column: Chiles acting out spilling his naproxen all over the lino; his shoulders hunched in resignation as he joins the queue for a pop-up restaurant he’s been forced to visit at emotional gunpoint; his hangdog kisser as he crams his misshapen parking ticket into the machine while the bollard remains unmoved.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about reading Adrian Chiles is how much warmth I feel for him. Last time I looked, my heart was nothing more than a bang-bang salad rapidly wilting on an LNER refreshment trolley, but for the first time, Adrian’s work has genuinely moved me from indifference to… what? Affection? Respect? It’s impossible to say. New emotions have been unlocked, everything I thought I knew about him is overturned, my synapses concertina’d into submission. In short, they are brilliant.

According to one column, Adrian’s greatest fear is being boring; ever since he caught a teacher stifling a yawn while he told a story, he’s been alert to losing his audience.

‘A couple of months ago I was told that something I had written here had been clicked on more than any other story in the Guardian that day. But in the next breath this data purveyor added: “Not many read it to the end, though.” Despair and humiliation prevailed; I could see the yawns as they clicked their escapes from me.’

I always read to the end, Adrian. Rest assured.

There are many milestones on the way to columnist nirvana – having someone falling in love with their writing enough to want to marry them being one, an achievement Adrian unlocked in 2022 – but perhaps the ultimate is being able to write whatever they want, with a word count that’s more flexible than a yoga studio full of back-bending twinks.

I cannot begin to imagine how labour feels, nor, thankfully, do I have experience of being operated on without anaesthetic. But I know for sure if I were unfortunate enough to find myself birthing a child or having something hacksawed off in medieval conditions, I can think of no better soother than an audiobook of Adrian Chiles’s columns. Yelping in agony or, uh, crowning, to the sound of Uncle Ady marvelling at the charming civility of the tiny wet wipes that come with a KFC boneless bucket, or recounting the tale of how he accidentally bought a packet of Femidoms instead of marigolds, but attempted to do the washing up all the same.

What is this?

The truth about everything* is a newsletter with a different content strand every week. I talk about TV shows, current affairs, columnists, and share my own thoughts on… well, everything really.

Word c•unt (rhymes with mount, not blunt) I pick out a column from a national newspaper or magazine and have a closer look at it, and discuss what it’s saying. Not in a horrible way. Just… in a way.

Do suggest one you’d like me to have a look at. For the sake of my mental health, I won’t cover transphobic or homophobic columns (halves my scope there, doesn’t it), unless it’s a news story so huge it becomes unavoidable.

More by me

I reviewed the very last Guardian Blind Date of 2022

Please buy my books

Books I read in 2022

More by Adrian Chiles

The full archive of his Guardian column

His book, The Good Drinker