Bottoms up

AH, the joys of being a medic. “Have you eaten today? Watch where you’re standing, sweetheart.

Don’t stand in your own vomit,” the doctor on the booze bus tells his patient.

It’s all in an evening’s work for those aboard the London Ambulance Service vehicle specially adapted to deal with people who’ve had too much to drink.

This is one of many horrific scenes in Drinking With The Girls, in which Cherry Chadwyck-Healey investigates female attitudes to alcohol.

Inevitably, this means drinking too much herself and, as a result, she becomes of the few TV presenters to be shown throwing up on screen. The people she meets during the course of the programme set her a bad example, from underage drinkers, through drinking mums to an old hippy approaching 60, who doesn’t look at the name on a bottle of wine, but the alcohol percentage.

Cherry begins with 20-year-old motherof- two Leanne and her friends in Blackpool.

They have drinking down to a fine art, wearing tutus so they can bend over at the bar and get a free drink (men are not advised to try this trick).

After a good night out, Leanne says she aches all over. “I don’t remember half of what I’ve done, but that’s what a night out is. If you can remember what you have done, it’s not good,” she says.

Listening to Leanne, you don’t need to be a psychiatrist to know that her drinking has much to do with her failed relationships and the emotional aftermath.

Going out and getting hammered is one way of pulling men – as she replies to a question about what a guy looks for in a girl – “easiness”.

She’s not alone in this drinking culture.

Her friend reckons they’re modern women. “Do you think 40 years ago you’d be sat here binge drinking with an effing tutu on?”, she asks.

Cherry goes on the frontline with the booze bus, armed with the fact that alcohol abuse costs the NHS £2.7bn a year.

A callout alone costs £650.

We, by which I mean this country, have some of the most hardcore teenage drinkers in Europe. While drinking among boys is declining, women are hitting the bottle more and more.

Fourteen-year-old Rio drinks because “we get bored a lot”. She and friend Megan’s favourite boozing location is deep in the woods at the local park despite her mother’s worry that “anything could happen”.

CHERRY joins the two girls in Rio’s bedroom where Megan swaps vodka – drunk neat from the bottle through a straw – for Baileys liqueur.

Rio’s on Bacardi, saying: “I don’t like the taste of it but I like the effect.”

Her mother prays it’s a phrase and she’ll eventually stop. Before she drinks herself to death, hopefully. At least, she made her go to counselling. “It helped, but didn’t make me stop drinking,” says Rio.

Students visited by Cherry seem to think that drinking too much is part of the curriculum, along with eating spaghetti hoops and mouldy bread. “I like being drunk, I like the feeling you get,”

says a Sheffield student. She won’t like the hangover in the morning, I bet.

Cherry’s experiment matching Steve drink for drink shows that women get drunk faster. She ends the session with her head down the toilet, vomiting.

Mother-of-two Christine is one of the few sensible drinkers we meet. She goes on the booze once a month and knows what her limits are.

Anne, 49, is one of the “midlifers” who turn to drink. She has no family and is unattached.

Alcohol fills a hole in her life.

Then there’s Jean, in Torquay, who founded The Red Hat Society, which is dedicated to older people boozing. But she tells a tale that should be a warning to all pensioners about the effects of drink.

After a drunken night out she lost her teeth down her electric toilet at home.

“People say you grow up and learn. You don’t. You just don’t do it as often.”