Halloween is approaching. The Americans, who go very big on it normally, are distracted this year by the election, so it feels like we have it more to ourselves than usual.
And nobody in Britain will be having a happier Halloween than Danny Robins, a former comedy writer and journalist who has cracked the big time with his extremely successful spooky BBC podcast Uncanny (which became a TV show last year), and his play 2:22 A Ghost Story, which had a four-year run in the West End and was taken up in productions around the world. This year the podcast is running an advent-style Halloween event, serving up a fresh, bitesize experience sent in by a listener every day throughout October.
Teens are the perfect audience for ghost stories
I’m afraid I’m completely hooked on Uncanny, despite – in fact, often because of – the flimsiness of the content. The great advantage of paranormal paraphernalia as a genre, particularly when it’s as expertly packaged, is that it cannot really fail. It’s either genuinely scary or it falls hilariously flat. Both are entertaining. Some of the stories in the countdown have been ludicrously thin – we’ve had ‘some bread fell off a shelf,’ two instances of ‘I saw a big dog’ (and a variant ‘I saw a big hare’ which for older listeners was inescapably redolent of Pipkins), and ‘there was a tapping noise I couldn’t immediately identify the source of’. Now most of those things happen every day to me. (Ok, not the hare.)
Robins gets away with this by switching between two modes; amiably informal, and bloodcurdling. He talks with a straight face of ‘witnesses’, ‘cases’ and ‘investigations’ as if this was a rigidly procedural process, not a naff laugh of a podcast, but also hedges his bets by always having two guests, a believer and a sceptic. The believer guest is usually a marvellously Gothic Scottish bombshell called Evelyn Hollow who lives in a world of disembodied whispers, airborne crockery, timeslips and mysterious taps on the shoulder, all related in a beguiling West Lothian contralto.
Watching or listening to people scaring themselves silly over nothing very much at all is always great fun. Robins is constantly suggesting that the popularity of his empire is something to do with a reaction to the highly technological nature of modern life, or a wider lack of spiritual meaning, or even that old standby of ‘Brexit and Trump’. I think it’s a lot simpler than that. People – particularly the young – just love daft scares.
Robins has a credulity that’s almost touching at times. He often refers to his witnesses’ previously solid characters using tropes I thought were long gone. ‘These were police officers and journalists: serious, credible people’ he said at one point recently. Bless such maiden innocence.
He also advances the notion that telling people you think you’ve seen a ghost might cause a person to lose their professional credibility. Others will gossip, doubt your sanity, you might get fired. But this is not so. The truth is far stranger. Say you’ve been pelted with peanuts in an empty room at 3 a.m. and co-workers will enjoy a vicarious thrill. Say you don’t think men can become women, or disagree with the much-vaunted idea that a black person standing for leadership of the Conservative party is a traitor to her race, but a black person who assaulted his pregnant girlfriend is a fallen hero, then you’ll likely get into trouble. That’s actually uncanny.
Robins is also fond of calling his listeners ‘the Uncanny community’, and painting the youngsters attracted to ghost stories as odd or notable. But hang on. Isn’t that everybody? This is another example of the modern repackaging of hugely popular and commonplace interests or characteristics as trendy nerdy quirks.
Teens are the perfect audience for ghost stories. Uncanny often captures the queasy teenage milieu when an ironic giggle about the paranormal slips into a non-ironic spooked-out sensation. I remember being 17 and having one of those eerie teenage chats with friends, then walking home, disquieted and alone, through darkened streets. I jumped out of my skin when I turned a corner to be confronted by two motionless shadowy forms. On closer examination they turned out to be life-size promotional cutouts of 80s football pundits Saint and Greavsie.
Uncanny perfectly recaptures that febrile, adolescent mix of titters and hysteria, of the time when you’re still calibrating your vital emotional reflexes, road-testing them using safe and silly scares. The genuine frighteners of life – ill health, age, war, Ed Miliband – can wait till later.
