FEATURE: Looking For Dad

By Mark McLaughlin
Edinburgh Evening News
November 28, 2008

CHARLIE RUSSELL looks down at the photo of the serious-looking young man with the neatly parted hair.

The subject appears pre-occupied as he stands, drawing on his cigarette, looking somehow as if he is both the centre of attention and not there at all.

The man whose image Charlie is gazing at is his estranged late father who died last year in Edinburgh, an apparently broken man.

Charlie can see the similarities between the man in the picture and himself. The physical resemblance is clear but this, he hopes, is where the similarities end.

A talented young professional photographer, who grew up in Edinburgh, Dave Russell had the world at his feet when he moved to London as a young man.

He was charming enough to win the heart of Charlie's mother Jo - the daughter of the celebrated writer Beryl Bainbridge - and seemed to have a promising career in front of him.

But that wasn't to be. For reasons that were unclear to Charlie as he grew up, his father's life seemed to fall apart.

He spent much of his final years back home in Edinburgh, mixing with street drinkers and down-and-outs around the Bread Street Salvation Army hostel.

Dave Russell's untimely death last year at the age of 53 sent Charlie, a 27-year-old London-based filmmaker, on a journey of discovery about the man he still cannot bring himself to call dad.

He still refers to his father by his Christian name.

When he, as next of kin, was called on to sort out his father's affairs, he decided to take a film camera with him and record the experience.

The emotional results of that decision - a film entitled Looking for Dad - are to be screened by the BBC next month.

Like the face in the picture, his somewhat enigmatic father is most definitely the centre of attention in the film, despite Charlie's professed aim to focus instead on his own journey.

"I didn't set out to make a film about my dad," he says.

"I'd just completed another project about my maternal grandmother [Beryl Bainbridge] when I got the call to let me know that my father had died.

"It was the first news I'd heard about him in about seven years but, as the next of kin, I was required to go and wind up his affairs and I decided to take a camera along to record it all."

The film creates a picture piece-by-piece of Dave's life, starting at its sad end - showing Dave's lifeless body lying in an open coffin at Mortonhall Crematorium - and building back from there.

Charlie's next stop was Dave's "dismal" flat in Tollcross, a tiny hovel filled with the debris of a life gone off the rails.

Scattered around the flat are nearly a dozen cameras - a remnant of his early life as a professional photographer and a reminder of his long-shattered early ambitions.

Dave Russell was born on May 10, 1953, the son of Peter and Dolly. He grew up in Gorgie, on Wheatfield Place, but as Dave approached his teens his father's work took him overseas to North Africa and Cyprus.

Later, when Dave was in his early 20s, the family moved again, this time to Seattle, but Dave decided not to join them. He moved to London, met his wife Jo, and they had two children - Charlie and Bertie.

When Charlie was two and Bertie was six months old, Dave finally took his young brood to Seattle to be with the rest of the family, but within a year they were on the move again. Jo found Dave's family "dysfunctional" and they moved back to England.

Dave and Jo's relationship began to unravel shortly after their return. The separation was messy. In a bid to secure custody, Jo told the court about Dave's drinking and drug use, painting him as an alcoholic and drug addict.

Charlie says: "Everyone I spoke to said Dave definitely wasn't an alcoholic. He like to smoke cannabis recreationally, and I agree this wasn't a responsible way to behave with two children, but I think the lawyers exaggerated this aspect during the divorce to secure custody of Bertie and I."

Following the divorce, Dave spent several years travelling around the world, seeing his sons only sporadically.

He often visited Edinburgh, even though he had no family and few friends left in the city, as well as returning to his other childhood home in Cyprus.

Chris Turner, a childhood friend from Cyprus, told Charlie: "When Bertie was 16 and Charlie was 18, Dave made one last bid to make amends with his sons. He wanted to take Bertie to Seattle to visit the rest of the family. It was all arranged and he was nervously looking forward to the trip. All throughout he kept waiting for Jo to step in and ruin it for him."

Jo did finally use her veto and the trip was cancelled. Jo found out the journey had a stop off in Amsterdam and feared her ex-husband would expose Bertie to his drug-taking during the trip.

Chris says: "After Jo pulled the plug he was just broken. It was the last straw. After that he just thought, 'what's the point if I can't get to see the boys?'."

Shortly afterwards, in 2001, Dave returned to Edinburgh to live. He was diagnosed with liver problems soon after, dying in January last year.

Charlie's search for the pieces of his father's life takes him to the Bread Street Salvation Army hostel.

They also track down his childhood home in the shadow of Tynecastle Stadium, standing bemused at the door, as if staring at the facáde of his birthplace would unlock further clues to the man he was, and the man he would become.

"I'd been to Edinburgh before for the Festival and during Hogmanay, and had a wonderful time there, but the places where my dad dwelled were not the picturesque places most people go when they head to Edinburgh," says Charlie.

"I didn't consciously seek out the worst parts of Edinburgh to put them on show in the film. As I explained, it wasn't my intention to make a film about my dad, merely to record the remains of the life he'd left behind, in order to make some sense of it all for me and Bertie. It was only when we got back to London and started going over it all that I realised there was a film there."

Charlie clearly feels there are lessons in the narrative of his father's life, especially for him and his brother Bertie.

"When I went over to Seattle to visit my uncle Pete, my dad's brother, he barely spoke to me. We were in his house for 40 minutes and made no attempt to make us feel welcome," he says.

"He often turned his back on us, something I remember Dave doing to us all the time as children when things got too much for him. Later, we learned that my grandfather was exactly the same, that Dave also grew up with a distant father and I think that left him ill-equipped to cope in the world.

"I think Bertie and I both have that in us. Bertie is very funny and you see in the movie that he likes to act the clown, but he also has his introspective moments. There's nothing wrong with being quiet and withdrawn, until you start using it a defence mechanism.

"I also have the capacity to be quiet and sullen, especially in my younger years, but I've learned to work past that now. I think we're both going to be OK."

Looking For Dad will be screened on BBC2 on December 10