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-class 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-class backstreet family at all—he was quite middle class. But he empathizes with the working class 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’ assiduousness. 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 appetite for ordinariness slipping away?” I ask.
At this, I see a glimpse of the more difficult, erratic Ray. “‘The appetite for ordinariness’?” he yells. “You’re talking to me! My appetite for ordinariness has never gone away. I fucking love my people and they love me back. What do you mean?”
“I think you misunderstand me,” I say.
“I bloody well do misunderstand you,” he roars. “My appetite 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 appetite . . .”
“Try your sentence again.”
“Did you notice the appetite 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, passionate 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 fuck 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 sex 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 cafés, statues, gnomes, and the seaside. Ray thought: death. “We went to a coffin manufacturer in Nottinghamshire 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.
“Nobody 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.”
By then, he says, he’d convinced himself that he had actually smothered Tony. The program was scheduled to air the night of Monday, February 15.
“On the Monday morning the phone rang, and it was BBC Breakfast—White City, London. They said, ‘Can you come on the Breakfast show to talk about death tomorrow?’ I got on the train to London and thought nothing of it. And then they showed the clip. And I thought, ‘Oh fuck!’”
The “Oh fuck” was, he says, his realization that the BBC had “set me up.” He believes BBC East Midlands had understood the power of the clip and given it to White City in the knowledge that it would generate massive publicity, even if that meant a prison sentence for their star presenter.
“The BBC used me,” he says. Had BBC East Midlands not told White City, nobody would ever have known about the confession. “It was a little local television piece in my own country, with my own people, who are very fond of me and have been so good to me. I have an intimate relationship with my people, a close, intimate relationship. They are absolutely gorgeous and bright and witty and strong and wonderful and they love you, and so you count your lucky stars. I fell in love with a bunch of beautiful, lovely, strong, brave people.”