History's Greatest Ghosts with Uncanny's Danny Robins
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Listener, never fear, it is I, Dr. Anthony Delaney from the After Dark podcast. And I am possessing your phone or your car radio or whoever it is that you listen to podcasts to ask you to vote for us in the Listener's Choice Award at this year's British Podcast Awards. Ooh, it's that time of year again. You can vote for us while you're folding laundry or learning about mass poisonings, or while you assemble furniture and contemplate mutiny, which I would mutiny if I was assembling furniture, or while you're lost in a graveyard that you thought was going to be a shortcut, but now you find yourself in the bowels of hell. Either way, you can simply go to www.britishpodcastawards.com forward slash voting and search After Dark.
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A clanking chain echoes through a haunted house in ancient Rome. A headless queen runs screaming through the corridors of Hampton Court Palace. And in the dead of night, Britain's wartime leader comes face to face with the ghost of an American president. From what may be the world's first recorded ghost story to royal phantoms and presidential apparitions, we're investigating the encounters that have left witnesses asking one terrifying question. What if the dead never truly leave us? From the shadows of the past, this is After Dark.
After Dark Thank you.
Hello and welcome to a very special episode of After Dark because today we are joined by, if you can ever forgive me this pun, but a kindred spirit on After Dark. He is a writer, broadcaster and producer best known as creator for the hit paranormal franchise Uncanny and one of my favourite podcasts, The Battersea Poltergeist, we'll talk about that in just a minute, He is also, of course, the writer of the Olivier Award-nominated West End Stage Thriller 222, A Ghost Story. Danny Robbins, welcome to After Dark. Hello. Thank you for having me. No, it's our pleasure. And not only is it our pleasure, our listeners will be beside themselves with this crossover. I see this comment in, can you get Danny Robbins on?
Can you get Danny Robbins on? Now we've got Danny Robbins on. You have what you asked for. Danny, this is... bizarrely, I suppose in one sense, despite the fact that I have a podcast, I'm not a big podcast listener. But the podcasts I do listen to, and probably the podcast that I loved one of the most, if certainly not the most, is the Battersea Poltergeist. I think it is such an incredible... exploration of haunting and storytelling. And of course, those two things go hand in hand, and we'll talk about that throughout this. But just talk to me a little bit about the experience of putting that show together specifically before we get on to talk about more uncanny things.
Yeah, no, it's a really interesting one. I think it's sort of something that felt quite defining in my life, really, and helped to kind of crystallise a lot of my thinking on how I wanted to hear stories, how I wanted to put stories together, the nature of telling these real-life ghost stories, really. And I think it was very inspired by... my love of detective stories, my love of true crime podcasts. And I fed that into the idea of processing this haunting like it was a crime, essentially, I guess. And so studying in that kind of forensic detail, the story fell into my lap, really. I'd been making another show called Haunted, which was a kind of prototype for Uncanny, I guess, and had sprung out of
the research for my play, 222, A Ghost Story, I just found I was accumulating these real-life ghost stories as part of my research, trying to make sense of how it felt to be haunted, I guess. And it felt to me like these are stories that needed to be told. And as part of that story-gathering process, I spoke to this guy, Alan Murdy, who's a very significant figure within the Society for Psychical Research, the world's oldest ghost-hunting body, and he was chairman of the Ghost Club, another really kind of legendary organization
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:01–13:42
2
How did Danny Robins describe creating The Battersea Poltergeist and its research process?
13:42–22:22
3
Why did Danny treat hauntings like forensic detective stories when making Uncanny?
22:22–51:15
4
What personal reasons draw Danny to ghost stories and how does fear of death influence him?
51:15–55:44