Ben Rogers as a child, before addiction took hold
Heroin addict Ben Rogers spent the last two years of his life recording a video diary. Robert Collins reports on the result
There’s a telling piece of footage that didn’t make the final cut of Ben: Diary of a Heroin Addict, Sky1’s upcoming documentary about Ben Rogers, who died at the age of 34 last year after a 14-year addiction to heroin. Ben spent the last two years of his life filming his family and his own drug-taking extensively. It is this footage that provides the raw material of award-winning filmmaker Olly Lambert’s unflinching film about him – and makes it a unique piece of television. No British documentary has ever got as close to a drug addict – because the sufferers themselves don’t normally record their own tragedy.
The moment that you won’t see in Lambert’s documentary happened a few weeks before Ben died from a brain haemorrhage, only 24 hours after booking himself into a detox programme to try to overcome his addiction. Ben slumps into a plate of food that his mother has prepared for him. And then, as he comes round into consciousness, he turns to the camera: “I hope you realise, Mr Editor, that I’m dying with every minute.”
As this comment makes clear, Ben had always intended his video diary to form the basis of a documentary. “He knew someone else was going to watch these tapes after his death,” Olly Lambert remarks.
When Ben’s mother Anne first saw some of the footage Ben had made, shortly after his death, she didn’t at first concur with her son’s wishes. “To be honest, I wanted to bury it,” says Anne Rogers, whose husband Mike died of cancer a few months after Ben’s own death, worn out in part by the stress of looking after his son, who had lived with his parents in their house in Alton, Derbyshire during his final 24 months. “I ended up beating my head it was so distressing,” she adds.
But over the following year something changed and Anne decided to allow the footage to be made into a professional film. “What I really wanted more than anything was to educate the authorities – the probation service, the police, the hospitals Ben went to,” she says. “Because I feel that heroin addicts don’t have any face in society. They’re counted as the lowest of the low.”
“I’m not trying to immortalise Ben; make him some sort of hero. The purpose is to show what addiction is like… At best it’ll destroy your looks and health. At worst, it will kill you.”
Ben had already edited his footage while alive into a rather incoherent 45-minute film. There was a story in a local newspaper that was later picked up by the BBC about this film, and Gecko Productions, a small independent production company, got in touch with Anne and asked her if they could make a proper documentary out of it. She was ready by then – and Gecko employed Lambert to do the job.
Lambert’s previous documentaries had been set predominantly in war zones – Afghanistan, Iraq, Gaza – but he instantly saw the compelling nature of the very different material he’d been handed here. Though he flinched at some of the footage – over 30 hours, it repeatedly shows Ben injecting heroin into his groin, since his veins were too damaged. “I thought it was too dark at first,” says Lambert. “But by the next morning, I thought the fact that I’d had such an emotional response to it is probably exactly why I had to do it.”
Lambert ended up making a film that was very different from the one Ben had hoped to make. “He wanted to film his recovery from drugs,” Lambert explains. “He wanted to be a romantic hero.”
Lambert’s film instead presents the sad story of a man fighting a losing battle. It has won Ben’s mother’s approval. “I think the documentary is absolutely amazing,” she says. “I think they’ve really honoured us as a family. They’ve not dumbed it down. But they’ve not sensationalised it either.”
If Anne Rogers now hopes this film about her son’s suffering will achieve some social good, her son’s relationship to the footage he left will remain a more tortured one. Lambert believes that Ben became almost as dependent on his camera as he had been on heroin. “At the end, the camera was the one person he could talk to in the middle of the night,” he says. “That camera was in and out of Cash Converters all the time. He had to pay up to £200 every time he got it back. That’s a lot of money when you’re really desperate. But he always went back to get it. It was the one thing he hung on to.”
. Lol, I will check back in tommorrow night after its finished.
