I ended last by quoting my mum’s final mantra that “no one knows the sum of their days”. This helped her navigate the terror of the cancer diagnosis which hung over her final weeks. Writing, I was still adjusting to the news that my friend and sometime boss, Jess Search, had herself been diagnosed with a brain tumour. Jess died on the 31st of July.
We were no longer close, I hadn’t actually seen her in years, yet we were friends at such a moment that she instantly became one of those forever people to whom you always in part belong. My love and strength go out to Jess’ family, her family of friends and every lucky sod like me whose life she touched.
Grief is often such an awfully selfish emotion. It is shaming that my first thought on hearing the news was just at the depths of my regret for not having bombarded her with questions and adulations across the years since last I saw her. Instead I’d contented myself in watching proudly from a distance thinking “that’s my mate” and sort of hoping that one day I’d finally return the favour and do something so good she’d see it in the skies and smile and think “hey, at last, that’s my mate.”
The faith and friendship she showed me remain a constant and powerful source of inspiration, of affirmation. Together with Cath and Stu, Jess founded Shooting People, initially just a smart and agile way of using email to pool knowledge and excitement and contacts to enable people to make films without the patronage of any industry insiders. Even when Jess became such an insider herself, becoming a titan of the documentary world, she never lost her eye for the outsider or her understanding that good art happens when the megaphones go to the people without voices.
Cath and Jess were the first people to give me a platform for my writing, the first to give me an income for it and also the quixotic job title Chief of Aeronautics, which I guess might cause dangerous confusion if I ever have to write a proper CV.
I often tell the story being a gatecrasher at an industry party where an exec grabbed me saying “Oh, you’re Ben Blaine aren’t you? We’d love to talk to you, we’ve been searching for you everywhere…” I only just managed to stop my idiot tongue suggesting the search would have been far easier had they invited me to the party in the first place. It was, of course, Jess who got me into that room.
That party lead to a place on a prestigious funding scheme and a long short film. In the middle of shooting, my Dad’s brain tumour was identified. I’d stopped sharing my work with him some years before, but his illness brought us closer than anything else had managed. He found it hard to sleep, so one night we watched a couple of my shorts together, a cold flannel on his bald burning head. It got late, he got tired, so I didn’t show him the new film that night, but by the next he was no longer himself, no longer able to watch anything. I don’t think I was easy to work with across that period. Whatever the reason, we didn’t work again with those execs and everything that had felt like it was starting then stopped.
Earlier this year Chris and I shot another short based around something bleakly funny that happened after my Dad died. I heard that Jess was still up for a jet black laugh so I meant to finish messing with the sound design and hurl it across the internet to her. But I didn’t. It needed time I couldn’t find. And once again, I am too late.
I think I’ve spent years trying to repay Jess without having the grace to realise that her kindness and her faith were not loans but gifts. Turns out I’m a slow learner.
I urge you all to read Jess’ inspirational parting statement, titled “No Time Like The Present”.
Such lovely words Ben x