Ray Gosling

Ray Gosling, speaking at The Brief Encounter (Croydon), 2 December 2008

Ray Gosling (1939–2013) was a journalist, broadcaster, and gay rights activist, and one of the founders of the Campaign for Homosexual Equality. He was brought up in Northampton, but lived mainly in Nottingham for most of his life. He wrote and presented more than 100 television documentaries, and was a long-term presenter on the Inside Out programme for BBC East Midlands.

Early life

Gosling was born in Brixworth, near Northampton in 1939. He was educated at Northampton Grammar School and the University of Leicester, and also briefly worked as a railway signalman, before dropping out to become the manager of a band, and then working in a factory in London and as a youth worker in Leicester.

Broadcasting career

He first worked in radio when he was interviewed as a campaigner for tenants' rights in Nottingham. He was then commissioned to record a series of talks, mostly interviews with what were called "ordinary people", broadcast during intermissions of classical musical recitals on BBC radio.

Over the years Gosling wrote 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. His 1974 Granada series Gosling’s Travels was praised by the Sunday Telegraph and compared to documentaries by John Betjeman and Ian Nairn. He specialised in "the sideways look at such eclectic and quintessentially British institutions as the working classes... and faded seaside towns, the minutiae of life."

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 1982 he wrote and narrated an episode of the television series Great Little Railways for the BBC, featuring northern Portugal. His television documentaries also included Granada TV's The Human Jigsaw in 1984, and a series about football supporters, The People's Game, which he narrated.

In 2000 he returned to television in a series of documentaries about his personal life over recent years, including his bankruptcy. This led to him being taken on by BBC East Midlands in 2004 as a regular presenter on Inside Out, where he reported 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.

Next came films on garden gnomes, statues, bus travel, OAP workers, frugal living, new arts buildings and windmills. His film on Joe Orton was part of a programme which won the RTS Midlands Best Regional programme in 2008.

Gay campaigning

Initially sceptical about the need for homosexual law reform, he changed his mind when an acquaintance was sent to two years in prison, and became an active supporter of the North West Committee for Homosexual Law Reform which later became the Campaign for Homosexual Equality.

An early CHE project was Esquire Clubs, aiming to set up clubs for gay people in various towns. Ray was unable to persuade friends in his home town of Nottingham to work for a club there, and spent a lot of time visiting other towns to promote the idea.

I was always doing meetings. Once, twice a week. Wolverhampton, Bournemouth, Southampton, Norwich. All meetings of gay people. And they would all be very enthusiastic to begin with. …. When they’d talked about it a little bit, and you wanted their name on the committee, because you wanted local committees, they all started to pull out.

In 1971 there seemed to be a real chance to get a club going in Burnley. Faced with considerable local opposition, CHE organised a public meeting in Burnley library with Ray in the chair.

"That there was no violence was largely due to the chairing of Gosling, who was praised in the Express and News report of the meeting for maintaining order 'precarious at times'.

He was an active member of CHE, along with Allan Horsfall, from its beginnings, and remained one of its vice-presidents until his death.

In later years Allan Horsfall and Ray Gosling ran Gay Monitor seeking justice for men wrongly accused of sexual abuse.

Later life

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 and Pensioned Off. Other radio contributions included items on BBC Radio 4's You and Yours in 2008 and 2009.

He was also 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 did 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.

In 2011 he confessed on television to having used a pillow, many years before, to suffocate a former lover who had been dying in terrible pain from AIDS. He was arrested on suspicion of murder, but released without being charged, and later given a suspended sentence for wasting police time.

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 perspective on 40 years of social history, is now safely preserved within the School of Arts and Humanities.

Ray Gosling died in November 2013, aged 74.

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