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

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.

His 1974 Granada series Gosling's Travels[7][8] 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.

"[5] 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.

In 1982 he wrote and narrated an episode of the television series Great Little Railways for the BBC,[9] 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.

[11] Next came films on garden gnomes, statues, bus travel,[12] OAP workers, frugal living, new arts buildings and windmills.

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.

Gosling's background in grass-roots activism chimed 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.

This was in contrast to much pre-1967 work by, in particular, the London-based Homosexual Law Reform Society, which was 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.

[17] In an interview with LeftLion magazine[18] in August 2013 Gosling stated that he had planned on writing his memoirs for a few years but had never quite got round to doing it.