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Journalist and activist Ray Gosling has died

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Ray Gosling and Griffith Vaughn Williams speaking in 2009. Pic courtesy of LGBT History Month Ray Gosling and Griffith Vaughn Williams speaking in 2009.
Pic courtesy of LGBT History Month

Ray Gosling, the journalist, broadcaster and gay rights activist who had a long association with Manchester and the north-west has died at the age of 74.

A spokesman for Nottingham University NHS Trust confirmed he had died at the Queen’s Medical Centre on Tuesday.

Once described by a Radio 4 controller as ‘one of those singular and particular voices that we need to cherish’, Gosling was for many years a popular and regular figure in Granada’s Television’s local programmes during the 1970s and 80s.

Last September, in an interview with the Independent, he recalled his first experience of presenting an outside broadcast, for Granada; a pioneering 1960s roadshow programme called On Site.

“They had a presenter in the Manchester studio, talking to authority figures, while I was out in the street with the people,” he recalls. “The first one was from Bolton. There was an outdoor stage. We had 2,000 people there. It had not been done before. It was live. I was nervous.”

A respected reporter of probing and incisive investigative journalism as well as a lobby, especially for gay rights and the repeal of the controversial Section 28 legislation that banned local authorities from ‘promoting homosexuality’.

In 2010, he was sentenced for wasting police time after he falsely claimed on a BBC show that he had smothered a former lover who was dying of Aids.

In one of his last documentaries he discussed old age, bankruptcy and moving into sheltered accommodation.

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