John Humphrys has said he thought he was an alcoholic after a drunken broadcast from Washington in 1974, describing how he was sent on air after a long lunch, a restaurant stop and brandy, then told, “Are you sober?”

The 82-year-old former broadcaster said in a new interview with The Times that he was working in Washington when he learned Richard Nixon would resign that evening and was pushed out live despite the state he was in. “I got through it. Just. But only just,” he said of the broadcast.

Humphrys joined the in 1966 and said the incident happened during the first decade of his career, before his first major presenting role came in 1981 and long before he left the corporation in 2021. He said he had gone for “a very, very, very lavish lunch” and had a couple of glasses of red wine, then moved on to a restaurant for “a martini or two”, followed by a glass of wine with lunch and brandy afterwards.

He said he staggered back to the office and was confronted by a colleague who asked, “Are you sober?” He was then told, “You’ve got to get on. They’ve booked a satellite.” Humphrys said he made it through the broadcast and that London later told his broadcast assistant, “You can’t do that again.”

The account sits awkwardly beside the polished authority that made Humphrys one of the ’s best-known presenters, including on Radio 4’s Today and Mastermind. It also points to a period in his career when heavy drinking was plainly part of the job’s darker edges, something he now says he no longer does.

Humphrys said the moment was the last time he ever went on air in that state. “I got through it. I didn’t fall off the chair, but it was painfully obvious I was pissed. That was the last time ever,” he said. For a broadcaster who spent decades asking questions of others, the story now lands as his own blunt answer to a much older question about how far the drinking had gone.