Ray Gosling
Ray Gosling (born 1939) is an English journalist, author, broadcaster and gay rights activist.
Early life
Gosling was born in Chester in 1939, brought up in Northampton, and educated at Northampton Grammar School and the University of Leicester. He moved to Nottingham and became a detached outreach youth worker in the inner-city working-class St Ann's district, and at the age of 23 he wrote an autobiographical account of this work, Sum Total.
Gosling has always maintained a home in Nottingham, while being based in Manchester for much of his broadcasting work.
Broadcasting career
Over the years Gosling has written and presented more than a hundred television documentaries, as well as several hundred radio documentaries. In the 1960s and 1970s he was one of the best known faces in television documentary programming. In this period he also hosted a weekly North-West regional programme on Granada TV, On Site, in which members of the public, in a different town each week, confronted officialdom with their concerns and complaints. In many of his documentaries on BBC Radio he used his distinctively quirky writing style to point up the rich diversity of people and places in Britain. Some of his best-remembered radio programmes were personal portraits of a series of different towns.
In 2000 he returned to television in a series of documentaries about his personal life over recent years. This led to him being taken on by BBC East Midlands in 2004 as a regular presenter on Inside Out, where he continues to report in his own individual style. His first film for Inside Out revisited his first TV documentary, Two Town Mad, made for the BBC in 1962. It was a comparison between Leicester and Nottingham and Gosling went back to the places and the people in the original film.[1]
Next came films on garden gnomes, statues, bus travel,[2] OAP workers, frugal living, new arts buildings, and windmills.[3] His film on Joe Orton was part of a programme which won the RTS Midlands Best Regional programme in 2008.
His BBC Four documentary Ray Gosling OAP beat off tough competition from Alan Sugar's The Apprentice to collect the Jonathan Gili Award For Most Entertaining Documentary Award at Grierson 2007. It followed the highly acclaimed BBC Four documentaries Bankrupt[4] and Pensioned Off.[5] Recent radio contributions have included items on BBC Radio 4's You and Yours in 2008 and 2009.
The value of Gosling's work was recognised by Nottingham Trent University in 2005, when it stepped in to save "an amazing treasure trove of groundbreaking TV and radio work which was in danger of being lost forever". The veteran broadcaster's archive, which includes films, tapes, scripts, cuttings and background notes providing a fascinating perspective on 40 years of social history, is now safely preserved within the School of Arts, Communication and Culture.
On Inside Out on 15 February 2010, he stated that he used a pillow to euthanise a former lover who had AIDS.[6]
Gay rights
Gosling was an early pioneer of the modern British gay rights movement, working with Allan Horsfall in the North West Homosexual Law Reform Committee of the late 1960s, which later became the Campaign for Homosexual Equality (CHE). Horsfall and Gosling now run a website called Gay Monitor which is partly a history of CHE and partly an account of more recent cases of discrimination against gay men.
Gosling's background in grass-roots activism chimed in with CHE's attempt to forge a democratic mass movement in which gay people were encouraged to take control of their own lives and fight for their rights, in contrast to much pre-1967 work by, in particular, the London-based Homosexual Law Reform Society, seen as "top-down", metropolitan and somewhat elitist and not run by gay people themselves (or not ostensibly so: in fact, HLRS founder A.E. Dyson and long-time HLRS Secretary Antony Grey were/are both gay, but never said so at the time).
Thus, at a CHE rally in Trafalgar Square, London, on 23 November 1975, Gosling said: "Last time it was done by an elite, who did it by stealth ... This time it has to be done by us, brothers and sisters".[7]
Lover Killing
Ray Gosling confessed to have killed his gay lover during a documentary on death and dying[8]. Ray even went into detail describing how he had said to the doctor: "Leave me, just for a bit,' and he went away. "I picked up the pillow and smothered him until he was dead. "The doctor came back and I said: 'He's gone.' Nothing more was ever said[9]. On 16th February, the Daily Telegraph reported that the Nottingham Police were to investigate the matter[10].
Publications
- 1960: "Dream Boy", in: New Left Review 3:30-34
- 1961: Lady Albemarle's Boys. London: Fabian Society (story of a youth club in Leicester)
- 1962: Sum Total. London: Faber. (Republished by Pomona in 2004 ISBN 1904590055)
- 1967: Saint Ann's. Nottingham Civic Society
- 1980: Personal Copy: a memoir of the sixties. London: Faber ISBN 0571115748
References
- ^ Two Town Mad BBC Inside Out East Midlands
- ^ Series 11 BBC Inside Out East Midlands
- ^ BBC Inside Out East Midlands 12 October 2009
- ^ Bankrupt BBC Four
- ^ Pensioned Off BBC Four
- ^ Broadcaster Ray Gosling admits mercy killing BBC News, 16 February 2010
- ^ Gay News 84, cited in Antony Grey, Quest for Justice: Towards Homosexual Emancipation, London, 1992, p.267. ISBN 1856191362
- ^ "BBC man Ray Gosling admits killing Aids-suffering lover ", BBC website, February 16, 2010.
- ^ "BBC man Ray Gosling admits killing Aids-suffering lover ", BBC website, February 16, 2010.
- ^ Police to investigate BBC presenter Ray Gosling over mercy killing of lover The Daily Telegraph