Sorry, not sorry. Going to have to bore you with who I am and how I got to the point of making Skin. Patience Little Mix fans, we’ll get to Jadey-pops soon. Read on if you can bear it. For others, who are interested in me as a filmmaker, read on and enjoy. It’s a rough ride.

     I was born in Hendon, Sunderland, in the Northeast of England on 21 November 1966, only a few miles down the coast from Jade’s birthplace of South Shields where she grew up in the Laygate area. Her future band mate, Perrie Edwards, lived just five minutes from Jade and knew many of the same people as they grew up, but they never met each other until the X Factor. Strange how things work out. Mine and Jade’s lives would be intertwined but go in very different directions from one another.

Back then Sunderland was only a town, albeit the largest town in England, and wouldn’t achieve city status until I was in my twenties. Sunderland at that time had a huge coal mining and shipbuilding industry and had previously been a massive glassmaking town through the centuries. Being established on the banks of the River Wear, the port was ideal for exporting all those commodities to the rest of the world. That was, until Thatcher destroyed those industries. The North remembers! I certainly do. I remember living through the coalminer’s strike in the 80s and not being able to get coal for our coal fire to heat the house, and spending hours chopping wood my dad and I had scavenged from demolition sites, loading up his old Bedford van full to the roof, just so we could have a fire to keep warm. Back then many people still had open coal fires. You don’t know you’re born if you haven’t had to clean out the soot and cinders from the grate on a cold winter’s morning, chopping up wood to make kindling in a frozen back yard with your nose running and your breath hanging in the air, or experiencing the ends of your fingers going numb and tingling when you held them to the flames once you’d finally got the fire roaring, because sometimes it would take a couple of attempts if you hadn’t set it right, and you’d have to take all the coal, sticks and newspaper out again and restack, trying not to burn your hands on the bits of coal which had been actually heated up a little.

I was born in the bedroom above my nana Joyce’s grocery shop where she and my step granddad Bob, lived and worked. Having a nana who owned a shop which sold sweets was heaven for a kid, to which my younger sister Karyn and brother Craig will testify. We lived a couple of streets away in a three-bedroom terraced house with no central heating and an outside toilet. If you needed to go during the night, you either had to use a bucket or trudge down the pitch-black backyard clutching a torch. In winter, you had to break the ice in the bowl before you could go, and there was no luxurious double ply toilet paper. Just scraps of hard newspaper which left ink imprinted on your hands and I dare say your backside. Ah the good old days!

We moved out of Hendon when I was fourteen, but the year previous we had all moved into the three-bedroom property which was my nana’s house, putting our belongings into storage so we could squeeze in. My parents, George and Janis shared a bedroom with my younger siblings stacked in bunk beds whilst I shared the bedroom where I’d been born, with my grandparents, sleeping on a mattress at the side of their bed. The third bedroom was crammed with both nana’s stuff and ours. One of the happiest and fondest memories of my teenage years was living with my nana, with a sweet shop on tap. The worst would follow pretty soon.

My childhood in the 70s was one of power cuts, strikes, heat waves, water rationing, bad hair-cuts and questionable clothing fashions, but it was a happy one despite the fact we never really had much. We never went without, but it always felt like we were just getting by, despite my dad spending years working all the hours he could on foreign building sites as a joiner in far flung places like Algeria, Holland, Germany, Belgium and the south of England.

He was one of the original builders who inspired the popular TV series, Auf Wiedersehen, Pet, about a group of British builders working abroad, which dad and I loved to watch.

I was a painfully shy youngster, my face glowing a stinging red if anyone even looked at me. I was mute unless I spent forever getting to know you, vanishing into the background in every social situation, just to avoid anyone attempting a conversation. I suffered from what is today termed Social Anxiety Disorder. It’s a condition which has officially been recognised as a psychiatric disorder since 1980. I hated it when people would say, “You’re very quiet”, “You don’t say much”, “Stop being unsociable”, “Come and say hello”, “What’s wrong with you?”, “Why’re you being so moody?”. It doesn’t help, it just makes it worse as you’re drawing attention to someone suffering from social anxiety!

My first day at Valley Road Infants school in Hendon is still etched in my mind some fifty-odd years later. When my mother left me, I cried my eyes out as if I’d been abandoned into a Victorian orphanage. The day lasted an eternity. I think that set the scene for my disliking of school for the rest of my childhood education.

After, I moved up to Valley Road Juniors, situated a few yards from the Infants where you’d get the paddle or gym shoe across your backside just for doodling in your exercise book. I know first-hand! I wasn’t a bad or unruly kid. How could I be when I was this shy wallflower? When I did get in trouble it seemed it was for the tiniest of things, and the go-to punishment was physical abuse by the teachers. But here I unknowingly made my first foray into entertainment. I learned the art of acting, at least whilst playing Brits and Nazis, a game us boys played, which had us shooting imaginary machine guns at each other accompanied with the appropriate sound effects and dropping to the ground mid run having been slain by a million invisible bullets. My peers agreed that I was the best at dying. My first accolade for show business! I had a lot of dirty knees in Junior’s school, but I liked the praise I got from performing these great deaths. I suppose I was the stuntman of the playground. Then for some inexplicable reason I was chosen to play Joseph in the Christmas nativity play one year. It was a nonspeaking part, which suited me, and when the cast were to sing a song, I was told Joseph wasn’t to sing along! Did the teachers think I was incapable? I did sing however because I felt the audience would be looking at me and thinking, why’s that miserable sod not singing like the rest of them? And I didn’t want that. But some loudmouth classmate grassed me up. The teacher then agreed that I could sing along if I wanted. It was never explained to me why Joseph wasn’t supposed to be singing. Next was the ‘big school’ as the adults called it, and so it was that in 1978 I set forth on an early September Monday morning at age 11 and made the mile long walk to Southmoor, the local comprehensive. First the lower school, then the upper school, which was slightly less far to walk. The one thing which sticks out about being in the lower school was that when we had a swimming lesson, we had to walk the half a mile or so there and back to the upper school building in order to use the swimming pool, which cut our lesson time down, and then spend the rest of the day with wet hair, water in our ears and eyes stinging with chorine.

Other schools called us Rusty Backs because our blazers were a rusty brown colour. I don’t think I’ve ever seen another school uniform this unique colour. For an introvert like myself, it was not the best camouflage. School and Southmoor did have one redeeming feature, because it was where I experienced my first crush on a girl. In fact, I’d go so far as to say I was madly in love. She was a cute blonde called Stephanie Steele. She was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, and I made every attempt to be near her in all our lessons. Always sitting behind and slightly to the side of her so I could gawk silently at her throughout lessons. I’d hang back until she decided where she was going to sit then charge to a seat which gave me the best advantage of seeing her, hoping no one else beat me to it. One time I took a strand of her hair from her blazer hanging on the back of her chair, kept it securely in my hand the rest of the day and ran all the way home and stuck it onto a strip of card and made a bookmarker out of it! I was a proper stalker! Funny the things you do when you’re a teenager in love. I so desperately wanted to be her boyfriend, but I don’t think she even knew I existed. I’d hang on her every word and try my hardest to find the right place to make a comment, just so she’d know I was there, but I could never find the confidence, so I wrote her a note and tried to get near her in queues so I could drop it into her blazer pocket without her noticing. I never got the chance because there were always people around who might see me and looking back, I’m pleased I didn’t. I think I’d have died with embarrassment if she’d told other people because everyone would have been laughing at me. Unrequited love is just as painful as losing love, which I’d discover a few years later. I think I spoke to her once in the entire three years I knew her, despite her being in my class. Pathetic! She affected me so much that many years later I’d write a novel with a heroine called Stephanie Steele, a totally unobtainable woman of unimaginable beauty.

Imagine my despair when at 14, and in the heat of teenage angst, my parents decided we’d move nearly ten miles away, making me change schools, never to see the love of my life again! It was like I’d been impaled on a red-hot poker through the heart! If I’d stayed at Southmoor I’d have had two more years to try and make an impression on her. Now I’d never see her again. And so, I bid a sad farewell to Southmoor and Stephanie when we finally moved out of nana’s shop to live in Houghton-le-Spring in February 1981, where I spent the worst two of my teenage years.

The kids there hated anyone from the town, Sunderland, and I was regularly bullied, to the extent that at 16, and two weeks before I was due to leave school for good, I had the orbital bone below my right eye fractured by one of the bullies’ steel capped boots which nearly knocked me out cold, after stunning me with several punches. Diane, a girl in my class who was the younger sister of my first girlfriend, Julie, who was in the year above me, grassed him up and we were both summoned to the Head’s office where he broke down in tears and made to apologise. Hard man! Some consolation considering that I had a trapped nerve which restricted my eye movement, giving me double vision for nearly a year afterwards. I had many trips to the eye infirmary that year.

The pain of losing a girl who was never mine and I’d never spoken to was eased by achieving the impossible, snagging my first girlfriend, an older girl by six months. Or rather her snagging me. The aforementioned Julie lived directly across the street from our new house. Her and her two younger sisters, Diane and Paula, immediately made friends with my sister Karyn, but I refused to come out to play. How could I socialise with three new girls when I couldn’t even speak to one in three years? After encountering Julie and Diane at school and being forced to speak to them by the fact that they ambushed me and spoke to me, it became a little easier and love slowly blossomed. It was a slow build but became an intense union and for two years we were inseparable. Love letters and notes passed between us every day without fail. And when we couldn’t see each other, we’d spend hours on the phone, racking up a huge phone bill for each of our parents. It was almost worth suffering the bullying just to have met her.

The same year I’d have my cheek bone cracked with a boot, I also suffered a fate worse than having your face smashed in. Worse than the feelings of losing Stephanie. I had my heart ripped from my chest when Julie, the girl I loved with a passion, dumped me after two whirlwind years of romance. First love is the one you love the deepest and it hurts like hell when it’s taken away. I cried buckets for days. I’ve never experienced pain like it since, and to this day I never got to the bottom of why. I suspect she met someone else because she was in another relationship soon after. Funnily enough he was also called Gary, minus an “R”. She’d go on to marry him and have kids. We did hook up again when we were eighteen and nineteen during a temporary break up with the other Gary, but it wasn’t the same and the second coming never got off the ground. Not only did she take my virginity, my heart, my love and my commitment, but my faith in matters of the heart. I’d never truly love another girl again. Not in the way I loved her at aged 14 to16. That was a unique experience, never to be repeated. But, bolstered by the confidence my first romance had brought, I had flirted and exchanged a few kisses with her two younger sisters; Diane who had come to my rescue during the assault, and Paula, in the interim, so it wasn’t all heartache. Haha! Other girlfriends would come and go, but the passion would never reach those giddy heights of first love. Julie had crushed me. It still leaves an indelible mark to this day.

I didn’t know what I wanted to be when I left school. I had no ambition other than not to ever go to college. I’d had it with education. It held nothing but bad memories for me. Not only was I bullied by my peers, in and out of school, but I suffered at the hands of some teachers. In those days, corporal punishment was still legal in schools. One time when I was in the equivalent of year nine at Southmoor, I was sat at the back of the class with a mate. It was history and the teacher was an ex-army soldier. My mate was messing about trying his best to steal my pen and I was trying to fend him off while hoping desperately that the teacher wouldn’t notice. I always tried my best not to be noticed whenever I could, but this time I proved to be the star of the show. The squaddie teacher marched us both out of the classroom, to his office where he produced a cane, marched us back to the classroom and gave us each a crack across the palm of each hand with the bamboo stick. I suppose the long walk was his way of making us suffer that bit more because we knew what was coming. Shocking! I wonder what he’d have done if we’d done something really serious?

One thing it did do however was, in a perverse way, get me an audience with Stephanie. I knew she was watching this abuse and so I tried to be brave and act like it didn’t hurt. In my mind, I was the dashing hero being wronged and I saw it bringing us together in some weird way where she’d take pity on me, and we’d start hanging out. Of course, it didn’t. No one even said anything to me after that lesson. Not even a did it hurt? And Stephanie and her friends wandered off to their next lesson. I was always daydreaming like that. Still do. I’ve come up with a few script ideas in my daydreaming.

The worst teacher incident was at Houghton Comp (Bully High!). There was a shortage of classrooms, so we were taking a lesson in the school hall and I, like many kids do, was swinging on my chair on two legs, when the teacher at the time grabbed me hard around the throat and screamed some obscenities in my face. It was a shock to have a teacher react that way, I can tell you. He was asking me what I thought I was doing. I couldn’t reply because he was squeezing so hard. He’d have been sacked today and charged with assault but back in the 80s you didn’t challenge authority like that. So yeah, school was hell for me. I wasn’t a very bright kid either, exceptionally average in academic terms. The highest grade I got was O-Level Art, equivalent to a British G.C.S.E these days I suppose, although I was quite good at English. I did like to make up stories and had a good imagination for it. Writing would play a big part in the following years after leaving school.

In 1983, the dole beckoned me with open arms, and with double vision and no real tools for employment, that’s where I stayed for two years thanks to Thatcher and the highest unemployment the country had seen. Over four million unemployed after she destroyed coal mining and shipbuilding. The UK wouldn’t get that close to those unemployment figures again until the Pandemic of 2020 which shut down the entire planet, the UK suffering the highest death toll across Europe, mostly due to the gross incompetence of Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his Eton Mess of a government whose unfathomable decisions on how to deal with an international emergency would destroy lives, businesses and the country’s economy, which may have a negative affect for generations to come, much like the reign of Margaret Thatcher had. At eighteen, and around the time I was forced into my first job as a gardener on the government scheme to help the unemployed back to work; a take this job or we’ll stop your dole threat, I was starting to take an interest in writing. Filmmaking at that time wasn’t featuring in my ambitions, but being a writer was. So with no previous training other than English at school and reading a few novels I set about trying, hopelessly, my hand at this art. At that time, I fell in love with, The Flowers in the Attic series of novels and other books written by Virginia Andrews, after my sister loaned a copy from a friend of hers and I read it. One of my first novels was along those lines, now gathering dust in a cardboard box on a shelf. I also wrote two badly written sequels to, The Planet of the Apes film series, which I was a big fan of, and started me on my cinema-going journey.

Bear in mind that the internet did not exist yet at this time, no one had mobile phones, and social media was just going outside and seeing your friends, so I was fumbling around in the dark, A LOT, when it came to knowing how to write. Not like now where you just have to Google something and it’s instantly at your fingertips. During those first few years of not knowing what I was doing I was buying writing magazines in the vain hope that it would tell me the secrets of this mystic art of words and I came across a correspondence screenwriting course, and so it was that I paid my £100, a fortune at the time considering my take home pay was about £65 a week, to take up this venture. Only the tutor had me doing all these uninteresting exercises, send them off by post and wait several weeks for a reply, before I could advance to the next exercise. Quite frankly it was boring and reminded me too much of school.

I abandoned that futile business and went on to buy How-To books on writing novels and screenplays and alternated between both for years, typing religiously on my typewriter, with carbon copy paper between two A4 sheets of cheap paper so I could send one off to an agent and keep one for myself. No laptops, home computers, iPads or word processors back then! We did it old school and it took forever, especially if you made a spelling mistake and used too much Tip-Ex (correction fluid) trying to fix it. Don’t complain about auto correct on your phone or PC if you haven’t typed a novel on a typewriter! Suffice to say, that the agents who received my creased and faded carbon copies of my manuscripts were less than impressed. At least in those days, they actually took the time to reply, even if it was to reject you.

At 26 and while I was scribbling crazy stories, I didn’t know it, but just up the road a couple, Norma and James Thirlwall, were celebrating the birth of their baby, born on 26 December 1992, who they’d name Jade Amelia Thirlwall. We’d meet almost 15 years later. For now, my life was about to take a detour. I’d met my future wife, Lisa, 21 at the time, and now we were expecting our first child, due in June 1993. We’d marry in 1994 and writing would become less of a career aspiration and more of a hobby, at least for the next nine years.

Jumping forward a marriage, three kids and a divorce to 2004 and my writing having faded into a nagging memory, I was now a single parent to my three daughters, Shauni, Hannah and Amy, who at that time were nine, three and two. My soon to be ex-wife Lisa, moved back in with her parents and nine years of marriage were over. You would think that was it for an aspiring writer, and any thoughts of filmmaking, but not quite. In fact, the opposite occurred. I found myself on income support as a single parent. Unlike the dole where they hounded you to get a job and threatened to stop your money for all kinds of reasons, being on income support meant they left you alone because you had children to look after, and I became a stay-at-home dad. I was lucky if I had to have a job centre interview once every six months.

Whilst being on benefits and having not much money wasn’t the best scenario, it did allow me ample free time to dedicate to my writing as during the day the girls were at school and most weekends went to stay with their mother, and after several years of not doing much of that because of marriage, work and kids, I was back in the writing game with a renewed excitement, and this time I was determined to make it.

It was around this time that I happened to see an ad in my local paper, the Sunderland Echo, for a screenwriting course. It was free for the unemployed, which is always a bonus, so I applied and got accepted onto the course. So once a week, for twenty weeks, I attended the university building on an evening while my parents babysat, and I learned all about writing for short films. I had never heard of short films in my life, and when I was shown some examples from a VHS tape, a light suddenly went on and I thought to myself, I can do that. And my ambition rudder changed towards the island of despair that would be directing and filmmaking, whilst towing behind the baggage of writing.

Cinema in my formative years was one of double bills. You didn’t book in advance if you wanted to see the latest film. No multiplexes in the 80s. No, you queued round the block, rain or shine, and if you were way back in the queue you spent best part of an hour wondering whether you’d have to come back the following day to try your luck again as there was only one screen and usually only one screening an evening other than a matinee. We had three cinemas in Sunderland; The Odeon, The ABC and Fairworld. Once inside you then had to sit through a B-Movie and various intermissions before the film you had come to see lit up the screen. My first ever trips to the cinema were with my dad at Fairworld. First to see Escape from the Planet of the Apes. I always loved Sci-Fi and especially if it involved time travel or an apocalypse. And secondly to see Rocky II. I didn’t mind that I was seeing sequels without seeing the originals first. Dad had seen Rocky in Holland on one of his working abroad stints and dragged me along to watch the rematch and I loved it. I can still remember queuing at The ABC for films like Rambo: First Blood Part II, to give it its full title, Rocky III and IV, Back to the Future and many others. Later as a film student I’d discover the director and fell in love with Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill. Wow! Now that’s a cinema experience!

Having my first child in ’93 meant that I acquired my first camcorder to document her every waking, and sleeping, hour. I have dozens of hours of baby Shauni on tape. The point is, I now had a camera. The possibilities! Actually, I never thought about making a film at that point, not in the traditional sense.

My first foray into film would be to use the camcorder to video my dad secretly so that I could put together a video to celebrate his fiftieth birthday. A friend of mine used his double-deck VHS recorder and we cut together a series of home videos from those I’d taken and from some old cine film of my parents from the 60s and 70s which mam had already had transferred to VHS, along with a vast amount of photographs of my dad showing his life from a baby born and raised in Fence houses, Country Durham in 1943, through marriage in ’65, parenthood, to his fiftieth. We set it to some music, and I had unknowingly produced my first film which was nearly two hours long. It was called, This is Your Life (George Moore: The First 50 Years). You could say it was my first feature film. I still have the battered VHS tape. It doesn’t make for interesting viewing unless you’re a family member and there’s no discernible narrative other than a load of video clips thrown together in a chronological order.

It would be another 11 years before I’d make another film, a short called ‘Dear John…’which is about John whose girlfriend has left him because he is a slob and can’t cook. He sets out to prove her wrong by preparing a tasty meal. The 96 second film was born at Brighton Film School in 2004 where I attended a summer school doing a Director’s Course in Motion Picture Production after seeing an ad in Empire Magazine, a film mag I’d been buying which featured reviews on the latest film releases.

The guy who ran the film school was one of the Habsburgs, a family which rose from obscurity to become the dominant political family in Europe during the Renaissance, who taught us the basics of filmmaking. Also attending the course was a guy called Andrew England who hailed from Durham, not far from where I lived in Sunderland. We agreed to team up when we got back to the Northeast, and we did make one or two short films and corporate videos before I left the blossoming partnership to finally make it to college after leaving school 22 years earlier. I was happy to do so because I was attending film school proper. It was 2005 and I’d gotten the film bug well and truly, but it was time I had some proper training and a qualification to back me up. Also, I’d have access to filmmaking kit. The essential ingredient!

So, as I was embarking on my film training proper in Middlesbrough, a 12-year Jade back in South Shields was experiencing her first kiss, according to her autobiography. Incidentally, the same age I’d had my first kiss with a girl called Jill during a game of spin the bottle in my local park. She was 16 and a blossoming woman, whereas I was still a child. These days that would be child abuse, but at the time I didn’t mind one bit. In fact, there were three girls and some of my mates playing, and I kissed all three of the girls! Not bad for a shy guy who was only twelve. Jill did ask me out through one of the lads, but I bottled it. Perhaps I thought I was keeping myself available for Stephanie. I regret that decision to this day. The things that 16-year-old could have taught my innocent mind!

At that point when I enrolled at CCAD, I was two years away from meeting the Disney fanatic Jade Thirlwall. A lot would happen in those two years, for both of us, and not all for the good.

Cleveland College of Art and Design in Middlesbrough was about a forty-minute drive from me, so ideal. I thought I needed to get a qualification in filmmaking in order to get a job in the industry. Oh, you silly fool! What made it kind of special was that it was the same art college director Ridley Scott had attended, albeit a different campus, but still, I was walking in the steps of a giant. Scott’s, Alien will remain one of my favourite films of all time. I first saw Alien when I was about 12 and getting it on with Jill. A teacher at Southmoor Upper School decided to set up an after-school film club where he would show films on actual film reels hired from some film library. As Alien is an 18 certificate in the UK we had to get permission from our parents in order to watch it, although I have no idea what the school was thinking ordering 18 certificate films for kids 16 and under, but thank the universe they did. It was in the winter, so it got dark early, and I had to walk home by myself across a pitch-black playing field. Suffice to say my pace was quick. That film scared the shit out of me. Later, I refused to watch The Exorcist because I would literally have had nightmares. I saw that film only a few years ago for the first time and I have to say it was a disappointment. I laughed most of the way through. Back then though I suppose it was pretty scary for a lot of people.

I didn’t learn a lot from film school as by that time I’d read just about every decent filmmaking book on the market and knew pretty much everything I was being taught, and I had shot a few shorts, unlike most of the rest of my cohort, who didn’t seem to know the first thing about filmmaking. Well after all, I was a mature student, and they were all close to being teenagers, so were not really taking this media thing seriously. They saw it as an easy degree, whereas I was looking at it as training for a career. The good thing about my time there was that I got to make films with actual filmmaking kit and actors and got feedback on how good, bad or indifferent they were. And we got to screen some of our work at Cineworld on an actual full size cinema screen where Hollywood movies had played to a packed audience. Awesome!

The best advice you can get from a filmmaker is to just make films. That is the best experience. And I did just that, borrowing the kit during term holidays to shoot films and using the college edit suites to cut them when we returned in term time. One bit of advice if you attend film school; make friends with the technicians and store people. They are a valuable source of help and hold the keys to the kit. I was a prolific filmmaker in those days, and I cut my teeth on some 40 short films. Many of them were bad, but I learned from them. Mistakes are good because you don’t make them again, or shouldn’t.

My end of year film, Cherry Pop, followed a teenage girl around on a typical day hanging out with her mates in the park as she retells the story of meeting her wayward father for the first time, but it turns a bit dark towards the end as all is not as it seems. Female leads and gritty urban shorts were the mainstay of my early filmography. Despite liking big Hollywood films with all their majesty, I do have a penchant for low budget gritty British films about crime, drugs and gangs.

Cherry Pop was nominated for a Royal Television Society Award in 2007, coming runner up to some film about baked beans because it had good use of sound. I have to say that I was devastated as I, and everyone, thought Cherry Pop was a shoo-in for the award. There’s no accounting for taste. The Americans however, loved it and it won the After Hours Film Festival with one judge commenting, ‘The best film that has passed through the festival in all the years I have been involved with it.’ Up yours RTS Awards! The film featured the song, Little Miss Perfect, which was a top forty hit in the UK for Summer Matthews, who I better knew as Holly, who had been in some of my earlier shorts, and would later go on to appear in a few British TV dramas including Waterloo Road, Casualty and The Bill. Cherry Pop did however star former children’s TV actor Hazel Pude, who would go on to star alongside Jade in Skin later that same year, but not before I’d make two more shorts with Hazel, who was fast becoming my go-to actress. And not forgetting Chelsea Halfpenny (Emmerdale, Casualty) who also had a big role in the film playing Hazel’s best mate. Chelsea was the niece of Jill Halfpenny (Eastenders, Coronation Street) who won the second series of Strictly Come Dancing, a popular UK TV dancing talent contest, in 2004. So even at that early stage I was seeking out emerging acting talent for my films.

The two years I spent at CCAD went by so quickly. I enjoyed every second there. I was making film after film, squeezing in my own productions in between college productions. I couldn’t get enough of it. Filmmaking was becoming my life. Whilst I was spending the happiest times of my fledgling career, the young teenage Jade was going down a dark path and experiencing the worst time of her life, suffering from anorexia and racial abuse from aged 13, leading to hospital visits, the doctor’s telling her that she would die if the anorexia didn’t stop. I can’t imagine the sheer pain, misery and desperation she must have felt. Quite a contrast.

After graduating from CCAD, I was offered a place at Teesside Uni and Bournemouth Film School to do a third-year top up degree, as my CCAD course was just a two-year foundation course. I dismissed Teesside because they, at that time, only taught factual filmmaking. Drama was my bag. I actually had an interview at Bournemouth and in hindsight should have accepted that offer because many of the students got placements with TV channels and big film companies, working on well-known titles. I couldn’t allow myself to live away from home so far away from my kids for a whole year and relying on my parents to look after them. Instead, I discovered that I could go straight into doing a master’s degree at Sunderland Uni, just five minutes’ drive from my house, if I did a four-month bridging course before it. I jumped at this opportunity. A master’s in film production would surely open industry doors for me a year down the line. That bridging course would be the catalyst that would bring Jade into my life.

On the bridging course, we were set our projects. As it was only four months, we had to get our acts together quickly. My final film piece for the course was a 13 and a half minute film called Skin.

Yes, that one. Jade was on her way.