From hauntings to hilarity… how TV is making ghosts big business
Radio Times magazine takes a look at the timeless thrill of things that go bump in the night.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine.
My very first job as a journalist was working in the obituaries department of BBC News. Each day I would walk through a door with Jimi Hendrix’s famous quote pinned to it: “Once you’re dead, you’re made for life.”
Right now, for those on TV opting to dabble in the afterlife, it seems the here and now is equally bountiful. Ghosts, and the pursuit of them, have become very big business.
A quick search on Netflix brings up almost a dozen sub-categories of shows promising to delve exhaustively into the paranormal, many asking the deliberately vague opening question, “Could this be a ghost, or something else?”
An honest answer would involve putting one big shrug emoji on screen and keeping it there for an entire hour, but clearly programme-makers have better ideas.
One of the most successful is Danny Robins, the wide-eyed host of Uncanny, the hit Radio 4 series-turned-TV show that returns to our screens for a second run this week.
Its premise is straightforward: guest turns up with a story of how their “otherwise normal” childhood was disturbed by unexpected, unearthly visitors and other possibly hallucinatory hoo-has, and Robins sets off in his bright red mackintosh to investigate.
Never mind whether these folks are Traitors or Faithfuls, what Robins wants to know is, “Are you Team Believer or Team Sceptic?”
To which their answer is always a variation on “I know what I saw”. Robins then tests their accounts with a series of increasingly bonkers experiments, ably abetted by a pair of “experts”: resident sceptic Dr Ciarán O’Keeffe, who explains why it’s all nonsense, and parapsychologist Evelyn Hollow – surely a name plucked from the pages of HP Lovecraft – who tells us why it might not be.
O’Keeffe, particularly, goes to great lengths to disprove the oddest of tales. For him, old walls might not be releasing Victorian ghosts but just Victorian toxins. Or to put it in plain English, that’s no mirage, just mould.
The stories are jaw-dropping for sure, and Robins has clearly hit upon a bottomless goldmine of user-generated content. His first TV guest, Kate, spoke of a woman standing over her bed, while Liam, who features in the new series, recounts a childhood Christmas that brought a surprise visitor.
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The yarns are much more absorbing than their narrative cousins “the dream I had last night”, and producers can be mostly confident that none of the apparitions getting such a bad rap will sue for defamation.
Robins himself looks like a cross between Professor Brian Cox, Simon Reeve and one of those big-collared professors who used to turn up on Open University programmes. But a glance at his comedy CV prior to Uncanny proves his urge for entertainment over science, and this is apparent in every conspiratorial whisper and meaningful glance to camera, as well as his impressive bouffant.
He knows how to keep us guessing all the while. Is it a ghost, or something else? I don’t think it matters. Kate’s strange woman was either next to her bed or just in her head; either way, by speaking about it, she felt less alone.
Meanwhile, for us, it’s a chance to succumb to the power not necessarily of the supernatural but definitely of the absurd, and the timeless thrill of things that go bump in the night.
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