BBC star Marcus Brigstocke has opened up about his struggles with addiction (Image: Getty)
Comedian Marcus Brigstocke has opened up about his struggles with an addiction to pornography which left him in a “terrible place”.
The 51-year-old comic is best known as a stand-up comedian and radio presenter throughout his 40-year career. But when he first got started in the TV industry, he landed a role in the children’s television sketch show Stupid!
However, it hasn’t always been plain sailing for the TV personality, who has battled with drink, drugs and a compulsive eating disorder.
Now, the comic has revealed to that he’s been in recovery for a porn addiction over seven years. He told the outlet: “It changed my sexual self completely. The things I was into sexually were altered by what I was seeing.
“I won’t go into specifics, but it taught me there is so much elasticity in our sexuality”. Marcus added that porn addicts have “really f**king awful sex if they’re having sex at all”, describing his experience as “awful, shameful, lonely”.
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The comedian has been in recovery for a porn addiction over seven years (Image: Getty)
“It’s unhappy,” he said. “Unhappy making. Afterwards, porn addicts will lie there thinking, ‘Well that seems to have made us really quite miserable’.”
Brigstocke added that his addiction “one hundred per cent” changed the way he interacted with women, leaving him in a cycle of shame and isolation and creating a “hole” that left him feeling unlovable.
The TV star split from his first wife Sophie Prideaux back in 2013, after he had an affair with his 2010 Spamalot co-star Hayley Tammadon.
Since April 2018, he has been in a relationship with fellow comedian Rachel Parris. The later tied the knot on September 14, 2019.
Marcus previously discussed the issue during an appearance on where he admitted that the “shame” from his affair “led to a lot of very dysfunctional behaviour”.
He told listeners: “I stayed sober from drugs, alcohol, and my compulsive eating disorder, but I had become addicted to porn. I really had no idea that I was addicted to it. I sort of thought I looked at a normal amount of porn.
“Well, the normal amount of porn today is not like a normal amount of porn… before the internet”. He went on to tell host Ben Branson that most porn addicts “were addicted from about the age of 11”, explaining it “profoundly alters your brain chemistry”.
“There are so many people with different depths of addiction to porn and to online social media”, he added. “But porn is the most toxic.”
The comic said he would watch porn “all night, for the entire night”, before he received help to end his addiction.