Ray Gosling

Ray Gosling
Gosling speaking to the Croydon Area Gay Society, 2 December 2008
Born	Raymond Arthur Gosling 5 May 1939 Northampton, England
Died	19 November 2013 (aged 74) Nottingham, England
Nationality	British
Occupation	Journalist, author, broadcaster

Raymond Arthur Gosling (5 May 1939 – 19 November 2013) was an English broadcaster, journalist, author, and gay rights activist.

He wrote and presented several hundred television and radio documentaries and regional programmes for BBC Radio 4 and Granada Television from the 1960s to 1980s on quirky aspects of life in different British towns and cities. His later documentaries focused on his personal life and his emergence as a gay activist. He was described as "one of the most uniquely talented figures in the history of British broadcasting."

In February 2010, he claimed during a local BBC television programme to have killed a lover in an act of euthanasia. He was briefly arrested, but the claims were false and he was later given a suspended sentence for wasting police time.

Gosling was born in 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.

He moved to Nottingham while in his twenties, and became a detached outreach youth worker in the St Ann's district. At the age of 23 he wrote an autobiographical account of this work, Sum Total, which was later republished. Gosling always maintained a home in Nottingham, whilst being based in Manchester for much of his broadcasting work.

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."