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Synopsis
“We’d a lot of fun in those tumbledown days. Hippies playing at being parish priests.” Personal Copy is Ray Gosling’s memoir of the 1960s. He writes about building and losing a youth centre in Leicester, trying to do things differently before retreating, bruised, to Nottingham. He made his name fighting to save the best houses and demolish the worst of the St Anns slums, which were home to 50,000 people, 500 shops and 50 pubs. Along the way he wrote pamphlets for the Fabians, stood for election (“Vote for a madman”) and was involved with major figures from the 60s, including his hero Colin MacInnes. His memoir captures the mood – or rather moods of the time: pill popping; tribal Labour voting; class-divided Britain; home to a new generation of immigrants with their blues clubs. He writes of the cafés, pubs and life on the streets. Speakers’ corner, the Sally Bash and the Communists in the Square on Sundays, crumbling Victorian mansions, overcrowding, allotments, the new art gallery, the backstreet lesbian bars… Ray Gosling describes his adopted city, still his home. Ray Gosling made over 100 TV documentaries and over 1,000 radio programmes, concentrating on the eccentric and the everyday activities of the people in the street. Now in his 70s he returned to national attention in 2010 when he revealed on television that he had a pact to kill a dying friend – a lover who was dying from AIDS and in terrible pain. Ray Gosling is currently writing a full autobiography.
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