Football ruined my life, says Alistair McGowan

The impressionist Alistair McGowan has told how his obsession with football became so bad that it destroyed his relationship with his girlfriend Ronnie Ancona, the comic actress who co-starred with him on BBC TV's Big Impression from 1999 to 2002.

"If we had stayed together, we would have killed each other ­ literally killed each other," he told the Guardian. "And football would have been responsible for that."

McGowan said he finally realised he was an addict when he went on holiday to Cornwall a few years ago with Ancona and a group of her friends. They all had one thing in common - "they couldn't care less about football" - while McGowan was obsessed with the game, even checking attendance figures on Ceefax. "I suddenly realised I had nothing to say to them."

He went on: "I never thought of myself as an addict. I loved the idea of turning up to see a play on a Saturday night with a football programme from the afternoon in my pocket. I thought of myself as cultured, interested in a wide variety of things, but I was an addict. I just didn't realise."

Although their relationship is long over, and Ancona is now married to a doctor, Gerard Hall, the pair have teamed up to write a book based on McGowan's addiction, A Matter of Life and Death, Or How to Wean a Man off Football.

In it Ancona offers a 12-step anti-football programme for addicts. It doesn't seem to have helped McGowan, though: his latest stand-up routine is still packed with football references and he has included the entire Leeds Utd team from the early 1970s in his acknowledgment at the end of A Matter of Life and Death.

As for Ancona, although she once felt "suffocated" by McGowan's obsession, it turns out her husband is obsessed with the beautiful game too.

At least he isn't a Leeds fan - a fate that befell McGowan by chance when he went on holiday as a four-year-old to Barmouth, north Wales and met an elderly woman called Mrs Drury.

"There's something quixotic in how we choose football teams we're doomed to stay with through the rest of our lives," McGowan told the Guardian. "For me it was this nice lady from Leeds I met on holiday."

McGowan returned home to his Worcestershire village a committed Leeds United fan. He even chose to read English at Leeds University partly because of its closeness to Elland Road. ·