| Ray Gosling | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1939 Chester, Cheshire, England |
| Occupation | Journalist, author, broadcaster |
| Ethnicity | White British |
| Nationality | British |
Ray Gosling (born 1939) is an English journalist, author, broadcaster and gay rights activist. In February 2010, he claimed during a local BBC television programme to have killed a lover, in an act of euthanasia. He was arrested[1] and released on police bail. On 20 August 2010 it was announced that Gosling would be prosecuted for 'wasting police time' in relation to the case as he had fabricated the claim and was not in the UK at the time of the death.[2][3] On 14 September 2010 he was given a suspended sentence for wasting police time.[4]
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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 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.
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.[5]
Next came films on garden gnomes, statues, bus travel,[6] OAP workers, frugal living, new arts buildings, and windmills.[7] 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 concerned his decision to move into sheltered accommodation. It won the Jonathan Gili Award For Most Entertaining Documentary Award at Grierson 2007 over tough competition from Alan Sugar's The Apprentice. It followed the highly acclaimed BBC Four documentaries Bankrupt[8] and Pensioned Off.[9] Recent radio contributions have included items on BBC Radio 4's You and Yours in 2008 and 2009.
He has also been involved in the work of young film maker Leila Newton-Fox, as his house was used as a location for her short film 'Stalemate'. Also he has done some narration for another short film by Leila that is currently in development about a blind man who was led down the stairs of the twin towers and brought to safety by his guide dog during 9 11.
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 and Humanities.
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 stated 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".[10]
Gosling was stated to have been near bankruptcy, and living in poverty, in 2002.[11]
On Inside Out on 15 February 2010 in an uncorroborated confession, he stated that he had used a pillow to suffocate a former lover. He said he had made a pact with the man, because he was dying from AIDS and in "terrible, terrible pain".[12] The act is murder under English law, but Gosling has not been charged.[12] He described how he said to the doctor: "Leave me, just for a bit." When the doctor had gone: "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."[12] On 16 February, The Daily Telegraph reported that officers from the Nottinghamshire Constabulary were to investigate.[13] He was arrested on suspicion of murder on 17 February 2010,[14] and released on police bail the following day without being charged. On 20 August 2010, the Crown Prosecution Service announced that Ray Gosling would be prosecuted because he had allegedly "...caused wasteful employment of the police by knowingly making...a false report tending to show that an offence had been committed."[15] On 14 September 2010, Gosling was given a 90-day suspended sentence at Nottingham Magistrates' Court.[16]