So Peter O'Toole has died, gone to join his brothers hellraising in the sky. Oliver Reed, Richard Harris, Richard Burton, George Best – sometimes it seems like all the most talented men of the British 20th century were total and utter boozehounds, quite prepared to generously donate their gifts to the bottom of a whisky glass, and after that, the floor of the pub.

"I did quite enjoy the days when one went for a beer at one's local in Paris and woke up in Corsica," said Peter O'Toole once, who also admitted it was "around 1985" before he heard the news of President Kennedy's assassination.

Oh, the stories were just better with that lot – like the time Harris was browsing some old photos, saw himself standing beside a Rolls-Royce, and started ringing round his ex-wives to find out if he had ever owned such a car. They had no idea but his LA accountant did – the motor was in a garage in New York, having accumulated $92,000 of storage fees.

Or Best's notorious quote that he "spent a lot of money on booze, birds and fast cars – the rest I just squandered".

In fact, it's become so easy to romanticise the hellraisers of the past that you can start feeling hard done by the fact that the ones we hear about nowadays are a bit rubbish. It's not that Miley Cyrus, Pete Doherty and Lindsay Lohan aren't talented people – they really are – but when they go off the rails and hole up getting blitzed out of their brains, none of them do it quite so quotably. (And let's not even get into the violence of Chris Brown and Charlie Sheen. Ugh.)

When Cyrus lit a joint at an awards ceremony, having already done her best in recent weeks to assert her conviction that she was the first woman in the world to ever have sex, the act of rebellion felt about as spontaneous as the lighting of the candle on the orange at a Christingle service in my mum's local church.

Remember the time the police seized a quantity of drugs from Doherty, only to drop the charges when the labs revealed the white powder contained nothing illegal? I mean, the man couldn't even source his narcotics convincingly.

Amy Winehouse was funny when she first talked about drinking and sang about smoking weed. Rehab was a brilliant song about not wanting to be helped – God, we all loved singing along. And then her drug use got harder, and more desperate, and then it wasn't funny any more; and then, when she was trying to clean up, she was dead, gone to join "the stupid club", as Kurt Cobain's mother described all the rock stars who end up dead at 27.

O'Toole and his drinking buddies all far outlived that club – but even so we should not romanticise his generation's addictions. O'Toole used to say that he and his friends drank so wildly because they had grown up with the terrible spectre of war and now they could play, running around as freely as children. I wonder if their actual children, and wives, left behind to pick up the pieces, would find the psychology of self-destruction as simple as that.

And while you're telling yourself about the good old days, when the stars were free to roam around villas in the south of France, unbothered by long-lens paparazzi, mobile phones or sightings reported by fans on social media, it's always a good idea to remember that these were the same good old days when a member of the Rolling Stones could start a relationship with a child, Phil Spector could murder his girlfriend, Ike Turner could beat up Tina and Norman Mailer – the hard man of American letters, with a reputation for drunken literary brawls – could go unpunished for plunging a knife into his wife's neck.

These were the same good old days of the great British drunken celebrity, who was also sitting somewhere alongside the criminal exploitations that would later be uncovered in the aftermath of Jimmy Savile.

Maybe the good old days weren't so funny after all.