With enormous warmth, film-maker Jack Archer has made an intimate documentary about Peter Jewell, the London social worker who was also the lifelong best friend, inspirational collaborator and – in a way that is perhaps not entirely elucidated here – a non-sexual partner of film-maker Bill Douglas.
Jewell was as important to Douglas, perhaps, as Peter Pears was to Benjamin Britten. (“He never said ‘I love you’ or anything soppy like that … we often hugged and held hands,” says Jewell.) He was the real-life model of “Robert”, the well-educated Englishman in My Way Home from 1978, the third part of Douglas’s autobiographical trilogy; he befriends the unhappy working-class Scot Jamie (modelled, of course, on Douglas himself) while they are doing National Service in the Egyptian Suez canal zone (and in a subtle way, showing that his “way home” is not back to Scotland but forward to a more cultured and creative life elsewhere, although the Scotland of Douglas’s childhood would always be vital).
