A chilling confession

The advent of reality TV has meant that we’ve grown used to people doing extraordinary things in full view of millions.

But has there ever been anything quite so chilling as the confession by broadcaster Ray Gosling, made in the recent Inside Out documentary broadcast in the East Midlands, that he killed a former lover?

Gosling’s stock in trade has become a kind of blunt, slightly eccentric, “Call-A-Spade-A-Bloody-Shovel” curmudgionliness. In follow-up radio coverage to the broadcast he’s referred, if not to his own act, then certainly to others like it as “putting down”.

So what is so astonishing about his revelation?  Does that question really need to be asked?  Yes because asking it raises a whole lot of follow-up questions.

He implies that he did it almost on impulse; that others in the programme had told him their stories about death, that he felt at home in what he regards as his community with what he refers to as “my people”.

Does that mean that he was heedless or reckless of possible repercussions?  Did he grasp the enormity of what he was doing and saying?  Or is he so out of touch with reality that he felt immune to any possible consequences?

The most chilling possibility of all is that we live in a society which accepts one individuals right to choose the moment of another’s death, the point at which they believe that other life to be worthless.  More chilling than that is the possibility that, if this is Ray Gosling’s belief, he may even be right.