Picture from Radio Times

I have always been fascinated by the idea of writers and notables keeping an archive related to their work and also their personal life. A documentary called The Secret Life of Bob Monkhouse broadcast in 2011 revealed that not only did he hoard photographs, home movies and letters, but also kept question cards from his various game shows and glasses from club gigs and scripts, drawings and memorabilia apparently stolen from the television companies he worked for over the years. The most revealing facet of Monkhouse's life was the obsessive way in which he videotaped programmes from the television, some of which are the only recordings that exist due to television's ridiculous policy of recording over various shows that weren't seen as important at the time. Another quirk, some would see as a sign of a mild form of autism, was that he kept television listing magazines that he had corrected with regards to timings (writing in pen that a programme started at 5.37 instead of the published time of 5.35, and replacing a chat show line up with replacement guests. This makes my collection of Christmas editions of the Radio Times look tame in comparison. Ray Gosling nearly had his entire collection consigned to landfill as he dumped the lot in a skip when he was forced to leave his house, luckily it was spotted and rescued by Nottingham Trent University who now maintain his archive. Here is a film about the items he kept throughout his career. 

Most impressive of all of course was David Bowie who apparently never threw anything away. The exhibition of his archives at the Victoria and Albert museum contained everything from handwritten song lyrics, drawings on cigarette packets, childhood school books and even a small spoon used for taking cocaine. On top of this was every iconic stage costume, an impressive feat when you consider how he maintained and organised this collection while spending a period of time as a drug-fucked mess, and towards the end of the 1970s had very little money due to mismanagement. It would have been so easy for him to have sold these items to raise much needed funds but wherever he was in the world he carefully kept tickets, books, notebooks and all manner of souvenirs. 

I have just watched The Undiscovered Peter Cook, another example of how occasionally BBC4 hit absolute perfection. When Cook died in 1995, his widow Lin Cook closed the door on their marital home and it has basically served as a sealed tomb until this year when friend of the family Victor Lewis-Smith (who still hasn't to my knowledge been thanked by Charlie Brooker for his whole shtick) was granted access to his personal collection. Found within this collection was a bounty of recordings and films thought lost, allowing us to see sketches that haven't been seen on television since the original broadcast. Highlights included a sketch with Peter Sellers, and thanks to combining audio cassettes and film, we were able to once again watch clips from Not Only...But Also, a victim of the BBC's wiping. 

It would be nice to see how many other people have kept and stored such items of their life and work, although at some point in the future when I'm dead someone can dig through discs containing all my radio shows and podcasts, notes, and my collection of kazoos. I bet the British Museum are salivating already.

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 This week's edition of The Sunday Alternative is here. 

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I was a latecomer to the work of Ray Gosling, which I put down to not living in the East Midlands for quite a large period of my life. Regional television is pretty much over these days, so watching Gosling’s work on Inside Out was out of the question unfortunately. Once he was in my radar though, I did as much research as possible. Footage of his documentary presentation is a little thin on the ground on YouTube, which is a shame really as more people deserve to see this work. You simply could not go to the television companies these days and suggest half of the things that he did on the television or radio back at the height of his success, because there’s too much compliance and too many focus groups involved.

The sad thing about the reports of his death that I have read so far is the mention of his notorious appearance on Inside Out. You know the one; he admitted to the mercy killing of a former boyfriend who was dying of AIDS. Eventually he admitted that he had made it up for television and was prosecuted for wasting police time. Work dried up after this, but he never lost what it was that made him unique.

Although I never had the pleasure of meeting him, I have spent the evening in the same room as him on January 31^st this year. During The Alan Sillitoe Season, there was a screening of his first documentary Two Town Mad, from 1962. According to the passage in the brochure from Lakeside Arts Centre, (which was frighteningly close to hand as I sit writing this blog, on my office notice board); Ray Gosling introduces the documentary film he made for BBCTV in which he gives a spirited comparison of the two Midlands towns in the early 60s. This wasn’t really what happened. What happened was that we were told that Ray Gosling was unable to make it along, and that we would watch the film anyway before talking about it. All of a sudden the doors burst open and shouting was heard, before the drunken shambling figure of Ray Gosling appeared to a hearty round of applause. One gets the feeling that he was being hidden away because of his drunken state, but after the screening he shouted his way through something resembling a Q&A session. He was brilliant of course.

His style of documentary making has perhaps influenced me more than I realise. I have mapped out a lot of ideas for filming next year, mostly things that have been turned down by television. The last short item I pitched to Inside Out was in my opinion a very good piece of television potentially; a light-hearted article about something that still gets under the skin of everybody in Nottingham. They turned it down because it didn’t (in their opinion) fit in with the seriousness of the programme, so I have decided to go ahead and make it myself and put it on YouTube. This is where Gosling missed the boat slightly, had he been in better health in his later years (both financially and physically) then he could have ruled social media. With a hand held camera and a computer, he should have spent his final years doing what he did best, documenting human life before going home and uploading it. Not only that but I imagine he would have been a brilliant blogger, and his tweets would have been fucking amazing.

Farewell Raymond Arthur Gosling, may you rest in chaos.