Leo bags a gong

“Absolutely floored,” was the reaction of Dublin-born documentary film-maker Leo Regan when his name came out of the envelope at the recent BAFTA ceremony in London.

On a night when all the conventional wisdom had it that the Best Television Documentary Award would go, posthumously, to Desmond Wilcox (husband of Esther Rantzen), the surprise but deserved honour went instead to 38-year-old Regan for 100% White, his intimate examination of the private lives of British skinheads. For once, an award winner genuinely didn’t have a speech prepared.

That Channel 4 documentary had grown out of an earlier photographic project, Public Enemies, which first brought Regan into contact with the world of right wing youth in Britain. Regan, some of whose early photographic and design work appeared in hotpress, followed Public Enemies with another powerful collection, Taken Down In Evidence, the product of two years spent riding shotgun around Ireland with the Garda Siochana.

In fact, it wasn’t until he was in his mid-thirties that Leo first swopped the stills for the video camera, but within a year Channel 4 were screening the first fruits of his labours.

Don’t Get High On Your Own Supply told the remarkable story of his close friend Lanre Fehintola, an intelligent, charismatic former petty criminal whom Leo had first met on a photography course in London in 1986.

It was Lanre’s uncompromising photographs of drug addiction and murder which illuminated an investigative piece into the dark side of life in Bradford written by another friend, the journalist Neil McCormick, for hotpress in 1992.

Lanre, however, got too close to the flame, subsequently becoming a crack and heroin addict himself, and it was this story which Leo told in Don’t Get High On Your Own Supply. At the time of broadcast in 1998, it appeared to have a happy ending, with Lanre proclaiming himself clean and finally earning a publishing deal for his own book of photo-journalism.

But not long after the cameras had stopped shooting, Lanre went into decline. The book deal evaporated and his heroin addiction deepened.

Three years on, covered in skin sores and living in squalor, he invited Leo to monitor an all or nothing attempt at getting off the drug, and the resultant film, Cold Turkey, was screened on Channel 4 barely a week after the BAFTA Awards. A harrowing, fiercely compelling and occasionally tragi-comedic document of Lanre’s ultimately doomed effort to beat the drug at home over a period of five days, it also highlighted the complex relationship between film-maker and subject, as Regan doubled up the roles of cameraman and unseen but often heard minder, motivator and confidante.

Leo showed Lanre the film before it was broadcast and his friend was, he says, “distraught” at the picture it painted. Since filming concluded, however, things appear to have improved somewhat. Lanre has undergone detoxification, moved town to Plymouth and at long last had his book Charlie Says… Don’t Get High On Your Own Supply published. As for his health? “He maintains he’s clean,” Leo told me last week.

Meanwhile, there was considerable public reaction to the programme. A typical call fielded by Channel 4 was from a distraught mother of a heroin addict who said that for the first time she could understand the horror her daughter was going through. The woman insisted that it should be shown again at an earlier hour, before hanging up in tears.

Regan, who admits that the film and its fall-out have also been emotionally draining for him, is currently taking a short break before beginning work on editing his latest project. Provisionally entitled Battle Centre, it will be the result of nearly a year spent in the midst of an evangelical sect in London who call themselves The Jesus Army. The documentary will be screened by Channel 4 either late this year or early in 2002.

Incidentally, following on from the success of Father Ted writers Arthur Mathews and Graham Linehan, Regan’s gong brings to three the number of BAFTAs now decorating the mantlepieces of graduates of hotpress.

Needless to say, we delight in all their success, the bastards.