Lost At Sea Part 13

And this is where my Bond journey ends. Bond gets captured and tortured in Geneva. I go to my room and flick channels, hoping for the purposes of veracity to find a movie in which people get tortured, Saw or My Little Eye, say. But I can't. Instead, I fall into a deep and elegant sleep.

I Looked into That Camera. And I Just Said It

In February 2010, the broadcaster Ray Gosling was arrested on suspicion of murder, having confessed on his BBC East Midlands TV show Inside Out to the mercy killing of his lover, Tony, sixteen years earlier. The papers were filled with supportive articles from right-to-die advocates and also from Gosling fans, who'd followed the work of this great pioneering TV journalist over his fifty-year career.

But then, on September 14, Gosling was convicted at Nottingham magistrates' court of wasting police time. He hadn't killed anyone. He'd been in France, reporting on a football match, the day Tony died. He was given a ninety-day suspended sentence after the prosecution told the court that his false confession had cost 45,000 and 1,800 hours of police time.

I've been a Ray Gosling fan since I was eighteen, when my college lecturer told me to seek him out. There was a place for people like me in the media, my lecturer said, and it was a place that had been carved out by Ray Gosling. By people like me, he meant people from the provinces who were a bit awkward, and had strange vocal inflections, but might be able to see the world in a fresh, non-Oxbridge way.

I watched Two Town Mad, Gosling's brilliant, influential 1963 paean to everyday life in Leicester and Nottingham. In it, you see the young Ray, with movie-star good looks, enthusing about Leicester's new drive-in bank and multistory car park over a sound track of swinging jazz. He made regional, working-cla.s.s ordinariness-things his contemporaries deemed too inconsequential to chronicle-seem exciting and cool and worthy of lyricism.

The day after the verdict, I decide to call him. It was such a mystery. What had made him invent the mercy-killing story? Did he think n.o.body would bother checking? What was his motive?

I tell him about my college lecturer and my subsequent years of fandom. "Since the conviction, my body has been bruised with people hugging me in the street and holding my hand, people loving me and cuddling me," he replies. "The main thing they say is, 'Oh, Ray, you silly b.u.g.g.e.r.' And you know what? There's not been one single word of criticism."

We arrange to meet in Manchester. At Stoke, I see him get on the train and wander into my carriage. "Ray!" I call. "I'm the person you're meeting in Manchester! What a coincidence!"

He sits down next to me, smiles. Then the train pulls away and he launches into a captivating commentary about everything we can see from the window: the color of some cows, the City of Manchester Stadium, various follies and statues. "This is the tunnel at Prestbury. It's the richest village in England. It's where all the grand footballers and executives live. The vicar died playing golf on the golf course... ." And so on.

"The BBC has been the great love affair of my life," he says as we get off the train at Manchester Piccadilly. "Fifty years. And now they've blocked me." He pauses. "Well, if there's no more broadcasting, there's no more broadcasting."

Then, as we catch the bus to Moston, North Manchester, a flash of anger: "The BBC is run by a load of guys who have never made a program in their lives, never told a story in their lives, never cried in their lives, never told a lie in their lives... ."

His point is that all nonfiction broadcasters walk a line. And he has a point. Journalism is storytelling. We wait around for the best bits-the most engaging, extreme, colorful moments-and we st.i.tch them together, ignoring the boring stuff, turning real life into a narrative. Even so, there's shaping a story and there's making things up.

On the bus, Ray starts telling me about his early childhood, about how his grandmother used to routinely embroider the truth. He was, he says, born into a working-cla.s.s backstreet family in Northampton in 1939. "My grandmother, my father's mother, used to keep a flower shop. When I was on my own, she'd beckon me over. 'Ray, you must never tell your mother this, but we're partly Jewish.' But she forgot the story sometimes, a bit like some of the stories I've told in my life and you've told in your life too. She would beckon me aside and say, 'Ray, you must never tell your mother this, but we're partly Gypsy.'" He laughs. "It wasn't enough for her to be English from Northampton. She had to always pretend to have that extra little bit!" (A friend of Ray's tells me later that even this story is a bit of an untruth: He wasn't born into a working-cla.s.s backstreet family at all-he was quite middle cla.s.s. But he empathizes with the working cla.s.s so powerfully that he's reinvented himself.)

He went to Leicester University but dropped out, he says, because he didn't like his fellow students' a.s.siduousness. They were after stable careers. He wanted a more adventurous life. He became a teddy boy and a delinquent. "I could take you to pubs," he says, "I'm not bragging, and I'm not going to tell the Greater Manchester Police, but I could tell you, I burned that down ..."

"What?" I say. "You burned pubs down?"

"I'm a wild boy," Ray says. "I'm going to carry on being a wild boy until they shoot me down in the street."

"What were you doing burning down pubs?" I ask.

He gives me a look to say, "Change the subject."

He started managing bands and drifted into broadcasting, first at Granada, then at the BBC. "Year after year after year I was earning fifty thousand pounds and absolutely loving it. Radio, telly." He pauses. "So lucky."

His first rough patch came in the mid-'90s when he started drinking too much. The period coincided with programs such as Louis Theroux's Weird Weekends coming into vogue and Ray's brand of poetic realism falling out of favor with commissioning editors.

"Did you notice the appet.i.te for ordinariness slipping away?" I ask.

At this, I see a glimpse of the more difficult, erratic Ray. "'The appet.i.te for ordinariness'?" he yells. "You're talking to me! My appet.i.te for ordinariness has never gone away. I f.u.c.king love my people and they love me back. What do you mean?"

"I think you misunderstand me," I say.

"I b.l.o.o.d.y well do misunderstand you," he roars. "My appet.i.te for ordinariness has never gone away. And my boyfriend will come round in a bit, and he's as ordinary as me."

"I'm not saying your appet.i.te ..."

"Try your sentence again."

"Did you notice the appet.i.te for ordinariness among commissioning editors slipping away?"

"Yes, of course," he says, not missing a beat, as if the yelling had never happened. "Once you get that many channels, forget it. You can't afford it. The kind of little niches I was able to get into? It's gone. And there's no way of bringing that back."

"They started to put crazy people on the television instead," I say.

"Yeah, they did. Crazies."

He declared bankruptcy and moved into sheltered accommodation. Then, just as it looked as if his career was finished, BBC East Midlands came along and offered him a regular fifteen-minute slot on Inside Out, which he did brilliantly right up until February 15, 2010, when he falsely confessed to killing Tony.

We arrive in Moston, where he's arranged to see his boyfriend, Mark, and a friend, Keith, in a pub called the Railway. We get to talking about Tony. Ray says they met decades ago in a bar in Salford. "It was an amazing, pa.s.sionate love affair. He was a courier, working Heathrow to New York. He came back from JFK one day and we went to bed. I said, 'I want to f.u.c.k you.' And he said, 'I can't, Ray. I think I've got AIDS.' And he'd got AIDS. It was the early days of AIDS. And I was with him through lots of troubles. We found a way to have some sort of s.e.x life." Ray says they had a pact because Tony was dying and in terrible pain. That part of the story was true. "I loved him. He loved me. I would have done it." But he didn't do it.

Sixteen years after Tony died, Ray was looking for subjects for Inside Out. They'd already done cafes, statues, gnomes, and the seaside. Ray thought: death. "We went to a coffin manufacturer in Nottinghams.h.i.+re who makes customized coffins. If you've been a skier, he'll make a coffin the shape of skis. I talked to people who had mercy-killed their loved ones... . I heard all these stories... ."

And at some point-while they were filming in the graveyard that Ray will one day be buried in-he got it into his head to tell the camera he'd done the same.

"Why did you say it?" I ask.

"It was a genuine feeling, after listening to these interviewees, mainly from Leicester... ."

"Like a surfeit of empathy?" I ask.

"My heart was bigger than my head," he says. "And in my muddled mind, I thought maybe I did do it." He pauses. "We were at my own graveside. Darren, my cameraman, said he wanted to take some pictures of autumn leaves falling. I said, 'Darren, put your tripod down. I'm going to walk toward you.' I looked into the camera. It was a winter's evening, four p.m. I was at my own graveside. I looked into that camera. And I just said it."

I killed someone, once. Not in this region, not in the East Midlands, but not so far away. He was a young chap. He'd been my lover. And he got AIDS. And in a hospital one hot afternoon, doctors said, "There's nothing we can do." I said to the doctor, "Leave me. Just for a bit." And he went away. And I picked up the pillow and smothered him until he was dead. Doctor came back, I said, "He's gone." "Ah." Nothing more was ever said.

"One take," Ray says. "One take. Took forty seconds."

"You said it in such an arresting way," I say. "It really stops you in your tracks."

"It does," Ray says.

"Maybe if you'd been a worse broadcaster and you'd just mumbled it out ..." I say.

"n.o.body would have paid any attention."

"You're a victim of your own broadcasting skills," I say.

"I am," he says. "My own storytelling powers."

He could have stopped the broadcast. He had opportunities. "They ran the final cut through for me. We watched in silence. My editor said, 'Ray?' And I looked at her and said, 'Let it run.'"

He could have stopped it even after that. "The BBC warned me of the dangers. I understood. I'd had dangers before. I'm used to dangers." He smiles. Still, he told the BBC, "Let it run."