The debt, alcoholism and the eventual sleeping rough all happened by degrees. It was thousands and thousands of small, subconscious bad decisions, influenced mostly by alcohol. Getting sacked from the business news channel CNBC meant I'd gone from £80,000 a year to zero and I'd been juggling what must have been 25 credit cards to keep things going.

How did you get to 25 cards?

I had an extremely good credit rating and the various companies kept offering new cards with bigger limits. When I lost my job the only way I could pay my minimum payments, which were about £2,000 per month, was by using other credit cards. Towards the end I got it into my head, possibly under the influence of alcohol, that I could turn this situation around by gambling - a typical addict's response. To begin with it was just horses, then it became the crack cocaine of gambling - virtual roulette.

How fast was your decline?

I was drinking socially and happily for 30 of the 40 years that I was drinking. The slide steepened and accelerated when I lost my job.

How did you end up on the streets?

I got a series of mundane jobs to keep my wife happy, to make her think I had things under control. But in the end she effectively threw me out and filed for divorce on the grounds of unreasonable behaviour. I had nowhere to go but friends' sofas, or briefly my mother's spare bedroom, then a garage, then council shelters, which I got moved on from. I began to sleep in a walled garden near my old home, underneath bushes.

It's been implied in the press that at first you weren't entirely truthful about the role alcohol played in your situation.

That's true. I was just being economical with the truth.

Why?

I was ashamed. I didn't want anyone to see that I was effectively a tramp.

Was there any way in which you enjoyed the notoriety of being middle class and on the streets?

Being middle class, well-spoken and still having fairly clean clothes was a hindrance as a rough sleeper, certainly to begin with. I was shunned by the others - they thought I was a fraud, that maybe I was an undercover journalist. But as time went by and they began to realise I was one of them, they accepted me.

You say in your book that you don't consider alcoholism a disease.

It's not a good or constructive way to look at it because that's very depressing. But if you see it as something that begins with a wrong perception that develops into a habit that forms a very firm grip and then becomes a chemical dependency, all those stages can be reversed. You can break the chemical dependency by simply locking yourself away. Not necessarily in expensive rehab.

You went to the Priory. What was your experience of rehab?

Very intense, very emotional. There's a great deal of talking, a great deal of crying but also a great deal of laughter. It is relentless - and outrageously expensive.

You must be aware that it would be a huge story if you drank again?

That's a massive incentive. Don't you think I'm lucky in having that? There are people going through recovery who know they could slip off for a private drink and no one would ever know. Well, they would know in my case - a bit like George Best, it would get reported immediately, and that helps me to stay on track.

But it didn't help George Best.

Well no, maybe that was a very bad example. If I was to go out and knock back a bottle of vodka that would let people down terribly. I couldn't live with myself. I actually think it would be curtains if I were to do that.

How do you spend your days?

Talking about myself. After the book launch and second documentary, I face up to the brute reality of a world deep in recession as a 55-year-old looking for a job. One-in-three men over 50 is unemployed. But I'd like to put all this behind me. I don't want to become a professional recovering alcoholic, a teetotal tart - that's not my route forward.

Cynics might say that what you have now is a very good story.

But I want to show people that I'm no longer, as they described it, "a hopeless drunk and a loser". I hope that happens. If it doesn't, if I don't get a job, I won't be able to pay the rent and I'll lose my flat. Then I'll be sleeping rough again, and the danger of course is: could I sleep rough again without resorting to alcohol?

• From Headlines to Hard Times by Ed Mitchell is published by John Blake Publishing at £17.99. Saving Ed Mitchell is on Monday 26th January at 8pm