Muriel Gray

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Muriel Gray (born August 30, 1958 in East Kilbride) is a Scottish journalist and broadcaster. A graduate of the Glasgow School of Art, she worked as a professional illustrator and then as assistant head of design in the National Museum of Antiquities in Edinburgh. After playing in a punk band she became an interviewer on the early Channel 4 alternative pop show The Tube from 1982 and presented The Media Show (1987-89) for the same channel. She was briefly a DJ for Edinburgh's Radio Forth in 1983 and 1984. She was a regular stand-in presenter on BBC Radio 1 during most of the eighties, most notably being John Peel's replacement. She also presented regularly on BBC Radio 4, for Start the Week in Russell Harty's absence and also during Jeremy Paxman's leave.

In 1996, Gray appeared on French and Saunders, with Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders, as an outspoken activist of Scottish history, she ends up scaring off the English invaders at the Battle of Gleneagles, with her behaviour, in a parody of Mel Gibson's 1995 film, Braveheart.

Later she presented The Munro Show (which documented her climbing Scotland's highest hills, the Munros). She accompanied this with the book The First Fifty – Munro Bagging Without A Beard. She also presented various other TV shows like Ride On, a motoring magazine show for Channel 4, The Design Awards, for BBC, and The Booker Prize awards for Channel 4. A landmark production was Art Is Dead – Long Live TV. This programme sparked a huge controversy when it was discovered that the series, covering the work of five artists, was a complete spoof. Gray's idea was to challenge the way we view art on television, but when press art critics (most notably that of the Daily Mail) fell for the deceit before the final revelation, claiming that they were well acquainted with the "artists'" work when in fact they were completely made up, Gray was a major hate target for these papers.

Gray has been a columnist in many publications, including Time Out magazine, the Sunday Correspondent, the Sunday Mirror, Bliss magazine, and now writes a regular column in the Sunday Herald. She won Columnist of the Year in the 2001 Scottish press awards.

She is a former Rector of the University of Edinburgh, the only woman ever to have held this post, and in 2006 was made a Doctor of Letters when given an honorary degree from the University of Abertay Dundee.

She became a best selling horror novelist with the publication of her first novel The Trickster in 1995, which was followed by two more, Furnace and The Ancient. Stephen King, the famous horror author, described The Ancient as "Scary and unputdownable."

Gray is nicknamed "the gallus besom", a Scottish colloquialism which roughly means bold or daring loose woman. She started her own production company in 1989, originally named Gallus Besom, then renamed to Ideal World in 1993.^[1] It merged with Kirsty Wark's company Wark Clements & Company in 2004 to form IWC Media. Gray, Wark and their partners then sold the new company in 2005 to media company RDF Media for an estimated twelve million pounds.

In 2005, she became Patron of the Scottish charity Trees for Life (Scotland) which is working to restore the Caledonian Forest. She is also a patron of the Craighalbert Centre, a conductive education school in Cumbernauld Glasgow. She currently serves as a trustee on the following boards: The Glasgow Science Centre, The Scottish Maritime Museum, The Lighthouse, The Children's Parliament.

She wrote the definitive history of Glasgow's Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum to mark its re-opening in 2006.

She has three children. In 1997 her daughter nearly drowned in a garden pond, which left her permanently brain damaged.

In her guise as a mountaineer she appeared in the comic strip The Broons.

She is the chair of the judges for the 2007 Orange Prize for Fiction.

She is a judge of the prestigious Robert Burns Humanitarian Award.

It is rumored that she is the writer of a new Doctor Strange series for Marvel Comics.

[edit] Bibliography

Fiction

• The Trickster 1994 (shortlisted for the 1995 British Fantasy Society Best Novel prize)
• Furnace 1996
• The Ancient 2000

Non fiction

• The First Fifty: Munro-bagging Without a Beard 1991
• These Times, This Place 2005 ISBN 0954633377
• Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum: Glasgow's Portal to the World. 2006 ISBN 0902752790

[edit] Notes

[edit] External links

• Gazetteer for Scotland biography
• Bibliography

Academic offices
Preceded by Archie Macpherson	Rector of the University of Edinburgh 1988 – 1991	Succeeded by Donnie Munro

Persondata
NAME	Gray, Muriel
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION	Scottish journalist
DATE OF BIRTH	1959
PLACE OF BIRTH	East Kilbride, Scotland
DATE OF DEATH
PLACE OF DEATH