It’s nearly three decades since Iain Lee roamed the streets for Channel 4’s 11 O’Clock Show, armed with clipboard and microphone, a string of filthy questions tucked up his oversized suit sleeve. He’s 52 now, and presumably he’s matured since he memorably interviewed the singer Cleo Laine about her husband’s masturbatory habits. But maybe not, because this summer Lee hit the streets again, where among other things, he mimed giving a blowjob to a 76-year-old who said he’d never been attracted to a man. A lot of the content on the original show was homophobic, Lee says, but he came out as bisexual in 2019, and maybe he now goes where his younger self didn’t dare.
Next month Lee returns with Impostor Syndrome – his first solo live gig in 10 years. The show is billed as a commemoration of three decades in showbusiness, but it’s also a self-experiment. Actually, he clarifies, he’s “recovering from impostor syndrome”. It’s an important theme for Lee, who is a recovering drug, sex and alcohol addict, nearly five years sober. It’s fair to say he has had a chequered career – for years, it seemed as if Jimmy Carr got everything Lee went for – and an eventful personal life, much of which has played out on air.
“I don’t really have a filter,” he says. “So it all kind of comes out.” After he switched from TV to radio in 2005, his catalogue of on-air disclosures included being sexually abused by his cubmasters when he was nine, coming out as bisexual, discussing his addictions, and announcing his divorce. On 2017’s I’m a Celebrity, he shared that he had previously felt suicidal and called the Samaritans. In 2019, he had “a kind of breakdown on air” in which he declared his own TalkRadio show pointless. Before he says a word, I know from listening to his podcast on Patreon a few nights ago that he’s been trying to lose weight for the photo shoot – “Holy shit, man! Did I say that?”, he says, running his fingers through his hair – and that he’s just proposed, on a boat on Lake Como, to long-term best friend, co-host and producer Katherine Boyle. (She said yes.)
Lee has been a professional counsellor since 2022, having retrained partly in response to some of the life events above. The blue-painted lounge his Patreon subscribers see doubles as a “counselling room” for his 20 clients. But, a few months ago, he phoned Katherine. “I said, ‘I’ve just booked a night at the Stables [venue in Milton Keynes]. She said, ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ I said, ‘I don’t know, but something is happening.’”
Something is happening?
“Something has shifted,” he says. He had this feeling before The 11 O’Clock Show took off in 1998. He had a vision. “Me in a grey suit with a microphone and a crowd of people behind me.” He can’t see it this time around, “but I know something’s gonna happen. Something’s gonna happen.”
Impostor Syndrome includes a watchalong of The 11 O’Clock Show. His mum recorded all his shows on VHS tapes, which he stashed in boxes in the garage. But this year, he digitised them. His social media platforms are laden with his archive. I can’t help wondering if he’s living off his youth – or learning to live with it. What’s he going back there for?
“I’m making peace with my past,” he says. “I was never very proud of my TV career. I thought it was shit.”
He was “fortunate and unfortunate” to have Sacha Baron Cohen, Ricky Gervais, Daisy Donovan and Mackenzie Crook among his 11 O’Clock co-stars. (He’s stayed in touch only with Crook, his former flatmate.)
“I compared myself to Sacha and Ricky. Which is a fool’s errand … I held a lot of bitterness and resentment towards them. I’d think, ‘They’ve stolen my career.’ Well, of course they hadn’t. It was lightning in the bottle twice. They were phenomenons.”
He didn’t get over the feeling till he was in his 40s. “If anyone was fucking up my career, it was me,” he says. “I was taking loads and loads of drugs and becoming incredibly unreliable and obnoxious to work with … an asshole.”
The fear persisted that “I do not know what I’m doing … So I took cocaine and it gave me this false bravado. It looked like arrogance but it came from absolute terror.”
It’s hard to marry this with the cocky guy in a cheap suit who asked the unaskable on The 11 O’Clock Show. Even Cleo Laine sent a message after his interview saying, “Thank you. I enjoyed that.” His interviews were brilliant.
“See, I feel uncomfortable you saying that,” he says, “because there’s still part of me that’s trying to think, Is that true? I’ve had it so ingrained that I’m not very good, that I’m a terrible human being. So when you say something like that …”
He’s squirming inside?
“No, it makes me tear up. That’s over half my life. And for so long, that poor boy, that poor me, thought I was rubbish,” he says. “My past has been chaos from a very young age. Sexual abuse – that never does anyone any good. And then ADHD [he was diagnosed six years ago, along with bipolar disorder], and then being really, really unsure of my sexuality and having this gay side no one knew about. I was so scared of being outed …”
So, reviewing those old videos, “I guess I’m going back to tell eight-year-old me and 12-year-old me and 24-year-old me that, actually, you’re not worthless, and you’re actually really good at some things. I guess it’s making amends with myself.”
Lee “grew up working class” on the Britwell council estate in Slough. His mum was a secretary at a school, then a PA at a chemical company before being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. His dad worked in the BBC props department and once stole a dalek, which he hid in the garage, pushing Lee and his sister around in it. He introduced Lee to Tom Baker, and the set of The Young Ones.
It’s a surprise to hear this stream of happy memories. Lee has previously suggested he had a difficult relationship with his dad.
“He was very flawed. Definitely a sex addict,” he says. “I still don’t know how many brothers and sisters I’ve got … We fell out for a long time.”
Lee can’t go into details about the sexual abuse he experienced in the cubs in Slough. He has given a statement to police, along with other men, and he plans to sue the Scouts. What he can say is that the repercussions of abuse “impacted all my life how I see older men. I had that around my dad. I could never talk to him.”
The most glaring example of this came when Lee was 23. His dad was working in Pakistan on the film Jinnah, and Lee had gone with him.
“I was Christopher Lee’s double. Imagine that. We were in Pakistan. And [my dad] said, ‘Your uncle Don has had a serious motorcycle accident. I think he’s going to die. I have to fly back and see him.’ I was like, ‘That’s awful!’”
After his dad left, Lee’s co-workers came up to congratulate him. “I went, ‘What?’ They said, ‘You’re having a baby brother, right?’”
It is, by any standard, a heck of a lie, but Lee sounds unsure of himself when he asks, “That was a shit lie, right? A bad lie?” His dad had “gone to see the birth of one of his kids … But I didn’t say anything when he came back.”
He didn’t call him out on it?
“I couldn’t.”
Even when his dad visited the set of The 11 O’Clock Show a couple of years later, Lee “went into this very quiet subservience thing”.
But then, he says, “I went home, took some cocaine and phoned him up. And I was able to let all this stuff out. And he kept hanging up on me, and I kept phoning him up. I said, ‘Tell me how many brothers and sisters I’ve got!’” He’s almost shouting now. Lee didn’t get an answer. But asking the question “had broken the spell”.
Lee is a father himself, to two boys, 15 and 13, from his marriage to the broadcaster Helena Wilkinson, which ended in 2018. Given the impact of his father’s addictive behaviours, does he worry about the impact of his own addictions on his sons?
“Of course I worry. Which is in part why I’ve spoken about all of this stuff.”
After Ant McPartlin’s car crash in 2018, his sons came to him and asked, “Have you heard of Ant and Dec? Do you know what an alcoholic is?”
It took Lee a couple more years to summon the courage to tell them, “‘Boys, you know I don’t drink? Ever wondered why? It’s because I’m an alcoholic. And if I start drinking, I can’t stop drinking. And if I start drinking, I’ll probably take drugs.’
“And they went, ‘Oh my God, have you done a drug?’ We had a chat. Hopefully they won’t go through the same self-loathing, and if there’s any questions about their sexuality, or they get into drugs, they’ll know that I’ve been through that,” he says. “They’ll know there is an alternative.”
The experience of parenting has clearly been transformative for Lee. Maybe even a kind of rebirth. He was born Iain Lee Rougvie, but dropped Rougvie before he got married. It was hard to pronounce, “and that was a period when I wasn’t talking to my dad. I regret that now.”
A few years ago, he says, “I gave my kids the gift of giving me my middle names.” The boys chose “Felix” and “Diamond”, after DanTDM, a YouTuber they liked. “I said, ‘Boys, you can go wilder if you want … My full name legally is Iain Felix Diamond Lee.”
It’s such a poignant story, and I wonder if Lee was able to make peace with his dad?
“I found some stuff [of his] in a box in my flat,” he says. This was in 2012. “We met up in this cafe. I walked in … And he looked old. And suddenly I wasn’t scared of him. And we had a really nice chat. I’m gonna cry,” he says, but he carries on talking.
“I told him everything I could remember that he’d done that hurt me.” Lee was in Narcotics Anonymous at the time. “And I said, ‘Do you know what? I forgive you for it.’ And I apologised for shouting at him when I was on cocaine. At the end, I said, ‘Right. I’m not prepared to call you Dad yet, but maybe there is something salvageable here …’
“Shortly after that, he phoned up and said, ‘I’ve got cancer.’ He was dead, I think, within a year. He fucking left me again!” Lee says, raising his voice. “He abandoned me again! And that was devastating! And some people couldn’t get it – ‘But you hated him your whole life’ – but we were making peace.” He looks out the window. The rain is coming down in thin, grey sheets.
“I’ve had good things happen to me,” he says. “I’ve had fun things happen.”
You got engaged, I remind him.
Boyle has been at his side since they met at BBC Three Counties Radio in 2012. She was in the studio for the episode of The Late Night Alternative when he had his “kind of breakdown”, in the course of which he also apologised for sending some listeners intimate images.
“You can ask me about the dick pics,” he says. “I don’t want to sound like Russell Brand and go, ‘Well, it was all consensual’, but it was all consensual.” Boyle has been there through it all.
“She’s a remarkable human being and I am blessed that she’s my fiancee. See, now I’m going to cry again!” he says. “I’ve put her through so much.”
Many of the key events in Lee’s recent life – his relapse, coming out, deciding to retrain – cluster around 2019. In February that year, he was in a car crash on the M40. A car went into the back of him.
“And I got out, and I was angry. ‘What the fuck was that, man?’ And then we looked behind his car, and a motorbike had gone into the back of him, and there’s a bloke lying in the road. It was fucking horrendous.”
Someone removed the man’s helmet. Someone gave mouth-to-mouth. Lee held the man’s hand. “And I’m shouting, ‘Don’t fucking die, man! Don’t die, come on!’” A few months earlier, Lee had kept a suicidal caller to his show talking, helping to save him. Here he was in the rescuer role again, or maybe he felt he was riding shotgun with death. The man survived, with lifelong injuries.
“And, honestly, it did me in. I stammer when I talk about it. I thought, this is my fault. This is why I went into therapy – because I thought it was my fault … And that’s when my counsellor said, ‘Do you know you’re bisexual?’ And clearly I was bisexual.”
In June 2020, Talk Radio didn’t renew Lee’s contract. “Katherine said, ‘Don’t worry. You’re Iain Lee. You’ll get a phone call.’ And for the first time since 1998, the phone didn’t ring. The phone didn’t ring at all,” he says quietly.
Within a few months, he started counsellor training – in the course of which a psychiatrist diagnosed him with ADHD and bipolar disorder. It’s a lot to learn in a short space of time but, Lee says, “It was great! It changed everything. I could start making sense of stuff.”
I can’t help wondering what Lee actually wants now. As well as Impostor Syndrome, he’s mooted the idea of reviving The 11 O’Clock Show, and he’s managing the band The Man From Delmonte. But “I’m just doing it because I think it’ll be fun,” he says. “It sounds corny, but I’ve got enough to pay the mortgage … I’ve never been in such an honest, open relationship … I get on so well with my boys … I’m more content than I’ve ever been.”