He said: ‘If you’re not born into money, you don’t know when it’s going to stop, you think it’s streak of luck. I really enjoyed working but all work no play take its toll.
‘The overwork, no holidays, no taking a break, eventually you snap, you try to replace it with something. In my case, it was cocaine.
‘Then the booze came along, then the depression set in… I was drinking two bottles of vodka a day and doing 10 grams of coke.’
Tony also touched upon the moment he gave up cocaine, saying it was the shame of his mother discovering £160,000 worth of cheques stuffed behind his sofa.
Admitting he was financially ‘naive’, Tony had been stashing cash from his agents there because he didn’t know what to do with them.
After quitting his drug habit, he sent it off for toxicology report, which found he had actually been snorting 5 per cent cocaine, cut glass and – to his horror, human and animal faeces.
Talking about his experience with the drug, he said: ‘It’s not fun, I wouldn’t recommend it, the devil’s dandruff, it heightens makes you uninterruptible, irrational, disinterested.’
In the midst of his woes, Tony met with a psychiatrist, who diagnosed him with bipolar disorder, a mental health condition that affects your moods, which can swing from one extreme to another.
‘Something else there, there’s something darker there, bipolarity. Stigma is getting better about mental illness, bipolarity is like autism or any disease, it’s a huge spectrum, it’s everything in between’, he explained.
‘It was unravelling, to use a cliché, you’ve got a cut infected by a microbe long time to find out what it is, what you need to take.
‘I am interested into the whole aspect of bipolarity how it used to be, rather dismiss it as he’s a bit moody, one day he’s this and another that.’
He said: ‘The isolation that comes with bipolarity and depression, you alienate people. They want to like you and love you, if you don’t answer messages that’s all they can do.’
Thankfully, the TV personality was able to stay afloat thanks to his ‘incredible’ partner of 35 years, Mark, who managed to stop him from isolating himself.
He recalled: ‘I met him in a musical, Me and My Girl, we were both very shy and didn’t speak to each for six months.
‘Our eyes lingered just a bit too long [on one occasion] – without him I’d be dead no question about that!’
Tony made light of how times have changed, saying that people forget he’s still alive.
Discussing his Edinburgh Fringe show, Tony joked: ‘People come up to me at the Fringe and say: ‘God, I thought you were dead.”
He had previously appeared in 2006 BBC Two programme The Secret Life Of The Manic Depressive to speak about his condition.
He said: ‘I rented a huge warehouse by the River Thames. I just stayed in there on my own, didn’t open the mail or answer the phone for months and months and months.
‘I was just in a pool of despair and mania.’
