The return of Danny Robins’s supernatural series Uncanny

These days, it’s the listeners who provide Uncanny with much of its content, falling over themselves to tell their spooky tales. Every day last month, there was a bite-size listener-donated titbit. Each was no longer than three minutes, but Robins gave them all status (more status than some deserve) with his enthusiastic, hyped-up presentation style.

What was the significance of finding a pompom hedgehog in an unexpected place? How to explain the slender-man figure looming outside the local library? Or a dead granny floating, in her nightie, in the sky? To be honest, many of these stories shouldn’t have been more than a drunken pub chat, but they made a nice lead-up to the new Uncanny series, which started with a doozy of a Halloween special.

Featuring not one haunted house but a haunted street, the hour-long episode tells the tale of Virginia and Charlie, who move to Bath from London with their young children. For a while, everything is fine, but then the taps and shower keep turning themselves on, full blast, for no apparent reason. Virginia is uneasy, but not exactly scared. At least, not until she mentions it to a neighbour, who says: “Oh, have you got the ghost?” Virginia visits other houses in the street where similar things have been going on. And then everything gets weirder …

It’s the structure of Uncanny that makes the episodes work so well. You reach an interesting point, and the show cuts away – to introduce an expert, or a sceptic – and keeps you hanging. We meet a plumber, who dismantles Robins’s own tap and explains why a sudden water-on event is so unlikely; and Ciarán O’Keeffe, paranormal investigator, who tests the houses on the road for a sound frequency disturbance that may explain things. (He doesn’t find it.) The first half of the episode leaves you desperate to hear what happened next – but the second part was recorded on Wednesday night in front of a live audience and so wasn’t available by the time I wrote this column. Which means that you – and I – will just have to listen to find out what happens ...

We could make a scary joke about last Sunday’s Private Passions, which featured Keir Starmer, except, of course, he was resolutely unfrightening and level-headed. Though you might have noted his musical choices were full of emotion: a scene from Swan Lake, Orange Juice’s Falling and Laughing, Frank Wilson’s Do I Love You (Indeed I Do). Starmer’s dad worked incredibly hard for long hours, he said (again), and there doesn’t seem to have been much time for expressions of feeling in his childhood. There were certainly not many to be heard here, no matter how romantic the music.

My favourite listen last week was the Radio 4 show Illuminated. It is a sort of replacement for the late, much-lamented Lights Out strand, in that it showcases interesting single documentaries, still one of my favourite audio formats. A small, polished gem instead of a multi-episode true crime waffle-athon? Count me in.

Last Sunday’s episode, Problems with Julia Masli, was just lovely. Masli, an Estonian clown, took her show ha ha ha ha ha ha ha to Edinburgh festival in 2023, and we hear snippets of some of her performances, as well as from other places. Performance, though, isn’t quite the right word.

As Masli explains, what happens is that she appears slowly on a dark stage. “I have a light on my wrist that is lighting my head and my head sort of floats into the space,” she says. “I have a mannequin leg instead of my arm, and there’s a microphone attached to the foot. I point that leg at an individual audience member that is looking open and willing to play.” And then she says to that person, in an odd, singsong voice: “Problems?” And the person says: “I’m misunderstood.” Or they say: “My younger brother doesn’t think I’m very cool.” Or: “Everyone around me is falling in love and it’s not happening for me.” Or: “Sometimes, I don’t understand why we’re all here.” And Masli responds.

The result is strange and funny, but also very touching. The whole project reminds me a little of artist Gillian Wearing’s 1990s photography series Signs that Say What You Want Them To Say and Not Signs that Say What Someone Else Wants You To Say. In that work, Wearing asked passersby to write whatever they wanted on a piece of A4 paper, which they then held up.

The most famous picture features a businessman in a suit holding his sign, which reads: “I’m desperate.” He looks shocked by his own revelation. The people Masli talks to surprise themselves in a similar way, and we hear a little of Masi’s Masli’s own problems, which brings her answers into context. The soundwork, by the brilliant Talia Augustidis, is fantastic, ebbing and flowing towards a final sequence in which questions about the meaning of life and death are layered over a man explaining what happens to the body when it dies. Scary, but also comforting and inspiring.

Photograph by Getty Images