Ray Gosling: Sum Total BBC documentary

Nottingham is undergoing an incredible regeneration at the moment across the arts. There’s plans for the city to bid to become a UNESCO City of Literature, the Nottingham Writers’ Studio has just moved to new premises and created what will be the best performance space in the East Midlands and Sleaford Mods are being quoted in the Guardian. Friggin’ nora, what’s goo’in on?

I’m sure all of this would make Ray Gosling smile if he were still around as his whole life was spent fighting for the underdog, though he would be the first to knock us down a peg or two if we got too self-congratulatory. He wasn’t one for smugness, Ray.  

Ray is currently the subject of an hour long documentary broadcast on BBC Radio4 celebrating his incredible life. It comes courtesy of Bob Dickinson and Mark Hodkinson, who republished Sum Total in 2004 with Pomona Books. Sum Total was originally written in 1962 when Ray was in his early twenties and captures a nation on the cusp of change as working class youth sawed off the rusty shackles the establishment claimed were glittery bracelets and began to define culture on their own terms.   

"Ray always reminded me of Columbo” explains Mark. “He'd turn up in his scruffy over-sized coat, shuffle about, scribble notes, wander off, start a conversation, start another conversation with someone standing close by, return to you, reposition his hair, make an observation about the furnishings or the view from the window. All the time he'd fool you that he hadn't much clue about very much but, really, he'd solved the murder, worked it all out, from the first minute he'd walked into the room.''

Mark has a 'soft' North Manchester accent (e.g. he's not pimping the north like Stuart Maconie) and it is fitting that he is narrating the story as it was Ray that helped normalise provincial accents on the airwaves through his 1,000 or so broadcasts. His quirky documentaries about gnomes, windmills and sheds celebrated the lives of ordinary folk and transformed broadcasting forever, all of which Mark was more than aware of.  

''It was a difficult programme to make because I sensed Ray's presence throughout, how he would have done it, what he would have said. Also, what he would have chosen to include because he had, despite how it might have appeared, a very keen journalistic eye. I'm a relative novice to radio documentary-making and he was a titan. I wasn't intimidated though, ultimately, because when Ray was his proper self he was always very encouraging and warm and a believer that anything done with a good heart will come out fine in the end.''

Ray Gosling: Sum Total was broadcast on BBC Radio4 at 8pm on Saturday 3 May.

Ray Gosling interview

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