It begins in Belfast, in 2021. Danny Robins, a comedy writer with a long-standing interest in the supernatural, has convinced a Northern Irish geneticist called Ken to recount the haunting he experienced in a Queen’s University Belfast hall of residence in the 1970s. The story, replete with strange noises and threatening presences, is terrifying and compelling. It’s an explosive start to the very first series of Uncanny – the spooky smash hit Radio 4 podcast, which is just about to plunge into its fourth series. Robins has looked into every sort of strange story – vengeful poltergeists, apparitions of departed loved ones, brushes with the devil, even a very alarming, potentially possessed toy telephone.

In 2024, Uncanny is – it is safe to say – officially a phenomenon. The series is one of the BBC’s most-listened-to podcasts. It’s been adapted for BBC Two. Uncanny: I Know What I Saw is the UK’s most popular live paranormal tour ever. And more than that, it’s germinated a vibrant global investigative community that constantly shares stories, theories and debates online. Robins’ exclamation of surprise on that first episode – “Bloody hell, Ken!” – now adorns t-shirts, hoodies and the mug I’m drinking out of right now. It’s a calling card that announces – “talk to me about ghosts”.

Having comprehensively captivated the UK’s paranormal-curious contingent, the new series of Uncanny sees Robins hop over the pond to investigate America’s strange, spooky and unexplained stories. Uncanny USA finds a country that’s processing its fear of death and mistrust of government and haunted by the relationship between indigenous people and colonisers. Does it also reveal a place that’s populated by actual spirits, its wild places home to Bigfoot and its skies peppered with UFOs?

The Big Issue: How was America?

Danny Robins: It was good. It was definitely an adventure. It was funny, our first arrival in America was picking up a hire car at Atlanta airport, and the guy we picked it up from was a big Uncanny fan. So that gave me a moment of feeling slightly like The Beatles. “Oh my god, we’ve made it in the States!” I don’t know whether he was just an outlier. Or whether he’d even been arranged by the BBC as a plant.

That would be some service by the Beeb! Tell us a bit about the stories you uncovered on your travels.

We were in the wilds of rural Georgia investigating this one ghost story, a really interesting case involving this young African American guy who is from a very, very deeply religious family. But the prodigal member of his family was his aunt Jean, who went off and was into voodoo and witchcraft and lived in New Orleans. She, really sadly, died in Hurricane Katrina. And then after that, he finds her old Ouija board. That spawns a really terrifying night in his life.

Then we headed over to northern California, which is proper wilderness. There are road signs for different places, and one of those places is “The End of the Road”. And literally, you hit the end of the road, and there’s just wilderness beyond that, places we were told human beings have probably never set foot. We were there to dig into the Bigfoot legend.

We met a lot of people, including people from the local Native American tribes, who were kind of surprised when they met people who did not believe in Bigfoot. They took it as accepted. As factual as bears or moose.  

We’ve explored so much in the UK, it was exciting to dive into a totally new arena for ghost stories. We’ve got this amazing bunch of really eloquent, articulate, interesting people from all different walks of life, telling us their stories. We deal with ghosts, poltergeists, apparitions, but also a UFO case, and Bigfoot as well.

Since we see so much American TV and we speak the same language (more or less), we feel like the UK and the US are basically the same, but we’re not really, are we? What were the big differences that struck you after making Uncanny USA?

One key difference is that, in Britain, we’re surrounded by a very long history. We live in historic buildings. We have that we have a huge trove of potential things to be haunted by. If you live in a Victorian house, it’s entirely possible you could imagine being haunted by Victorian ghosts, or actually, literally be haunted. You’re never that far from a castle or a stately home. So, I think our ghosts are often linked to quite long-standing historic stories and folklore traditions.

A lot of American ghost stories feel much more recent. They often feel linked to traumatic and violent history. A lot of American ghost stories have to do with murder, to do with serial killers. Ghost hunting in America often takes place in asylums and prisons. You tend to find it’s less domestic and more based in these kinds of institutions that were associated with punishment or torture.

It’s interesting that America has got this very difficult relationship between the indigenous people and the people who settled and colonised it. So in America, you notice that kind of trope that you see popping up in horror movies, like Poltergeist, about having built your house on a Native American burial ground, having usurped somewhere that you shouldn’t.

Were there similarities too?

One big similarity is that Britain and Americans are terrified of death. And I think that breeds a certain kind of ghost story. I think, if you have a problem with death, and the whole business of dying, then your ghosts often end up quite terrifying. There are other cultures around the world where ghosts are more benign and more linked to a tradition of being in touch with ancestors.

But at heart, the paradox of ghost stories is that they bloody frighten us – and we want to be frightened by them – and yet they present this amazing comfort as well, this possibility that death is not the end.

We’ve stopped believing in a lot of things. We don’t we don’t believe in fairies, we don’t believe in elves, we don’t believe in unicorns. But, even if you don’t believe in ghosts, you still entertain the idea. As a sceptic, you wouldn’t find yourself in the pub debating the existence of unicorns, but you would happily make your case about what you think about ghosts. I would say, both in American society and British society, there’s still a kind of very big place for ghosts.

Another similarity between our two countries is that we’re both in this strange state of flux, of political unrest and upheaval. Whatever side of the political divide you are on, we live in times that feel chaotic, uncertain, and potentially frightening. We’re faced with death through the things we’re experiencing together: Covid, and climate change, and war. And I think, in both countries, we’re looking for answers. Ghost stories can feel like an antidote to the horrors of the world, they can feel like a place to escape to, I think.

Absolutely, we’ve talked before about the link between what’s happening in the world and the prevalence of ghost stories. Was there anything about the way that manifests in the US that pointed to particularly American fears?

It’s interesting that UFO stories have been so big in America, because UFO stories really tap into this narrative of invasion. And obviously, the negative side of that discourse around fear of the other is the kind of instinct that make certain people fear migrants and refugees coming to their country. One view of UFOs is as this threat coming, a danger to us. The other side of that is a beautiful idea that these beings are going to bring something positive. So I think you can either see UFOs as hopeful or scary, but certainly, either way you view them, I think it feeds into a very modern kind of narrative for the world.

• The Witch Farm: Danny Robins follows Uncanny with ‘plunge bath of pure terror’ 
• Danny Robins on the return of Uncanny: ghostly monks, poignant poltergeists and famous UFOs
• Ghosts star Ben Willbond on show’s devastating Christmas finale: ‘As with life, you’ve got to move on’

The interesting thing, I think, about America and UFOs is of course, it’s a very American thing to be distrustful of government… and central government particularly.

Oh yeah, totally. We live in the era of the conspiracy theory, and I think UFOs, and also Bigfoot, fits into that. There is a huge distrust in government in America. I think there’s a big distrust in government here probably as well. Very sadly, our trust in authority has been eroded. A big part of the stuff that feels so frightening at the moment is we don’t feel that we have grownups looking after us anymore.

Ok, well that is a frightening thought. Which feels like a good moment to ask you, which of the new Uncanny USA cases scared you the most?

The case that takes place at night in rural Georgia a very scary one. That’s somewhere where you really do feel totally alone. When it when it’s dark there, it’s total darkness. The person describing that talks about a slice of pure terror.

Another one that scared the pants off me, as I heard it was the one that takes place in Alaska, about the Bigfoot, or The Hairy Man, as it’s often described there. It feels really scary for two reasons. One, Alaska is a landscape that could kill you flat out, even without anything paranormal there. But also, when you hear Bigfoot being described in such real terms, as this savage primate animal, in real close proximity to you, that feels very real and very shocking.

Finally, before I let you go, I did want to ask you about the Uncanny: I Know What I Saw live tour. You’ve been all over the UK with it now, and every night people tell you their stories from the audience. How has it been to meet the Uncanny community in person, en masse?

I love watching people open up in that way. And there were some madly fantastical stories, like a woman who saw the disembodied head of her neighbour in her cereal cupboard. I mean, that was hallucinatory and surreal. And yet to her – very, very real. There were some very powerful stories as well, about people feel that they’d had contact with their loved ones. I felt really privileged to share in some of those moments.

There’s this hugely cathartic outpouring of emotion every night and whether you’re a sceptic or a believer, I think there’s a need to talk about it. There’s a kind of hunger and desire to talk about this subject. Being able to dive into those delicious, deep, dark mysteries of the unknown just feels fun really. I love being on stage and sharing that, sharing an enjoyment of asking questions and a desire for answers. And that little shiver down your spine that deeply excites.

Uncanny USA begins on BBC Radio 4 and iPlayer on 30 April. Danny Robins goes on tour with Uncanny: I Know What I Saw from 23 May, uncannylive.com.

Rick Edwards was born in Enfield, North London, in May 1979. He studied maths at Pembroke College, Cambridge, before switching to natural science. During his time at university, he developed as a stand-up and went on to perform on the circuit, often as a double act with Joe Wilkinson.

His television breakthrough came in 2005 as a presenter on E4 Music, after which he graduated to Channel 4’s Sunday morning magazine show T4. That led to stints presenting Freshly Squeezed, Tool Academy and Impossible, among many more. In 2012, he presented Channel 4’s coverage of the London Paralympics.

A growing interest in youth engagement in politics led to Rick Edwards delivering a TEDx Houses of Parliament talk in 2014, presenting BBC3’s debate programme Free Speech and the publication of his book, None Of The Above, during the 2015 general election campaign. He returned to his love of science with the hit podcast Science(ish) with Dr Michael Brooks which investigates the science behind popular culture and led to a spin-off book in 2017.

Since November 2021, Edwards has hosted BBC Radio 5 Live’s Breakfast show each weekday morning, usually alongside Rachel Burden, and began presenting the station’s hit sports-based panel show Fighting Talk in September 2023.

Speaking to The Big Issue for his Letter to My Younger Self, Rick Edwards looked back at his disruptive younger days, his reaction to fame and the challenges of live radio.

I wasn’t very well behaved at school and got in trouble, mainly for backchat and being disruptive in class. So just before my GCSEs, my school wanted to kick me out. My dad said, “Well, can he at least do his exams?” So the agreement was I could do them, but I wouldn’t be there for my A levels. I think it was testament to the fact that I’d spent five years annoying most of the teachers and they were sick of the sight of me. Looking back, that’s probably with good reason. 

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At 16, I tried to be funny over almost everything else. I had no real idea what I wanted to do with my life. I liked certain bits of school, mainly the social aspects. And I enjoyed exams, which I accept is completely bizarre, but I’m very competitive. From the outside it might’ve looked like I was quite driven, but I just liked the idea of beating other people, which isn’t the same thing! 

I was an only child and completely spoiled for attention. That’s probably what got me into trouble at school and what led me to the ultimate career for an attention seeker. Oddly, since I started being on telly, that need has evaporated; it’s like I’ve satiated it. Now it’s not something that particularly motivates me. 

Even now, if I need advice, I will often turn to my dad. He ran a garage selling tyres, doing MOTs. So even though what I do is a million miles from his work, there’s something about that feeling of reassurance from a sensible, clever man. And he was always really supportive of me. I can’t remember if him pushing back against the school for me meant a lot at the time, but it means a lot looking back. 

My family would watch the telly together. We’d have our trays and we’d sit, have dinner on our laps and watch TV. I always really loved that. But until I went to university I just had no inkling that a career in television, or being a comedian or anything like that was a possibility. I didn’t know anyone who worked in the media. I didn’t know anyone who’d ever met anyone who worked in the media. So if you told me I’d end up being on TV and radio, I would have been baffled. 

I was always confident, but I don’t know if I necessarily knew what to do with it. Your sphere of opportunity expands massively when you go to a university like the one that I did [Pembroke College, Cambridge], where there’s a lot of well-connected people who feel like they can do whatever. And that does rub off on you. There was a TV station, student radio and a comedy club, which was the big thing for me. Me and my dad bonded over TV comedy like Harry Enfield and Blackadder and sometimes we’d go and see live stand-up – people like Harry Hill, Frank Skinner. To go somewhere where I could stand up on a stage and a) try and make people laugh and b) not get in trouble for it – that was revelatory.  

I was very lazy at 16. As a kid I didn’t want to put work into anything. I wish I’d done more comedy when I was at university, but I did enough to give myself the idea that maybe I could pursue something performance-based. When I was 20, I auditioned for T4 when Dermot O’Leary was leaving. I got down to the last two; it was me and Colin Murray, though I didn’t meet him at the time. In the end they gave it to Vernon Kaye. But to get through this protracted audition contest to the last two made me think, ‘OK, so this is not an unrealistic ambition then.’ And a few years later, I got the job on E4 Music that led to T4. 

My younger self would assume that I’d embrace being famous, even at that very, very, very low level. And I quickly realised that wasn’t the case. I didn’t like being recognised, didn’t like people thinking that they sort of knew me. It seems selfish, but when I was out with my friends and people started coming over to talk to me, it felt like, ‘this is an intrusion’, even though people were being perfectly nice. I think it’s difficult to predict how you would react to it. I’d feel very self-conscious in public, like people were looking at me, even if they weren’t. I’m much more relaxed about it now. 

• Colin Murray: ‘I never, ever wanted to be on the radio’
• Edith Bowman: ‘It would be unbelievable to the teenage me that I ended up being on the telly’

Success would have meant having my own snooker table, a dedicated table for Subbuteo, or a room full of Scalextric. I would never have imagined that I could be in a position where that would be possible. I would have been mainly motivated by money because I have this narrative in my head that I grew up not well off. Thinking about it recently though, I don’t think that’s quite right. I went to a fee-paying grammar school on a scholarship, so basically everyone’s parents were better off than mine. If I had gone to a regular state school, I wouldn’t have felt like that at all. It really informed how I felt growing up. Objectively I was wrong – we were lower middle-class and doing fine. 

If you said to the 16-year-old me that I’d write a book about politics [None of the Above, 2015] it would sound impossible. It just wasn’t on my radar. I can remember feeling excluded, not deliberately, from chats about politics at university and later. I’d just zone out. It was a lot later in life when I started to think, it’s a shame that my experience is so commonplace, that there are so many young people disenfranchised by politics. In some sense though, the pinnacle would be working for the BBC, because when I was growing up the BBC was the big one, it was grown-up and serious. And so going in to work every day, with my BBC pass – I would’ve thought that was pretty cool. 

We’ve had two wars break out in the two-and-a-bit years I’ve been doing the [BBC Radio 5 Live] breakfast show. I can vividly remember the day that Russia invaded. I felt completely out of my depth. When you’re talking to people whose loved ones are dying or their home has been destroyed, it was unspeakably awful. I don’t have any journalistic training – generally speaking, I don’t feel like I’m lacking, we’ve got a great team and it’s all fine. But when you have that grounding, you’re better at maintaining a distance and more able to compartmentalise. There were a few times when I couldn’t hold it together and cried on air. I don’t beat myself up about it because we’re not the Today programme, the whole show is really talking to people about their experiences. Everyone at 5 Live was very supportive but I don’t think it was perfect broadcasting from me if I’m brutally frank.

If I could, I’d relive two moments. The first would be the first time me and Emer [Kenny, his wife] kissed. We were on the bus and it was coming up to my stop, so I said, “Look, you’ve got two options here. You get off the bus and we kiss, or you stay on the bus and we don’t.” And so, she got off the bus. We got engaged at that bus stop six weeks later, which is clearly sort of insane, but I think we’ve been vindicated.

The other one would be when I was about 32 and me and my best friend camped on the Great Wall of China. I’m still not entirely sure you’re allowed to do it, but we went with a guide. We had to clamber over a barrier and he kept saying, “This is completely fine”, and we were like “OK!” We woke up to watch the sun rise and it was just a real moment. I still can conjure up the exact feelings. We played backgammon up there, had some coffee. It was absolutely ideal. We’re still talking about it.

If I could have one final conversation with anyone it’d be my nana. We were really close. She died when I was quite young. There’s nothing specific that I’d want to tell her, but I’d just like to show her my life and introduce her to my son. I think she’d be really proud of me basically. 

Rick Edwards presents BBC’s 5 Live Breakfast every weekday 6-9am and Fighting Talk on Saturdays 11am.  

This article is taken from The Big Issue magazine, which exists to give homeless, long-term unemployed and marginalised people the opportunity to earn an income.To support our work buy a copy!

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In 2022 the BBC announced major cuts to its local radio services across England. The changes consist of combining shows across the network’s 39 stations – some time slots will merge shows by region, others will be broadcast across England.

The cuts aim to save £7.5m, according to the Financial Times, part of an effort to save £500m from the BBC’s overall costs. The savings are in response to the two-year freeze on funding put into place by the government in January 2022 and the December 2023 announcement that the licence fee will increase by just £10 next year. After having been frozen for two years, this means a real-terms cut to funding. The government has since revealed it is launching a review into the future funding of the BBC.

The cuts began in autumn despite widespread opposition. The move will disproportionately impact elderly people, disabled people and minority groups, the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) warned.  

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Stations have been dogged by technical problems, complaints about irrelevant content and falling listener numbers. The full impact of the cuts is yet to be seen, but there’s concern vulnerable people won’t be able to access local news. “It’s not uncommon for an area to have a major incident [which locals need to be kept up to date on],” explains Kay Hallsworth, CEO of Gosport Voluntary Action, a charity which provides support for community groups. 

Hallsworth explains that the cuts could be deadly for vulnerable people: “They rely on the radio, if we don’t have local services that know the specific risk to a specific area then we’re risking lives by not being able to get the information out to them.”

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Sarah Gayton, street access campaign coordinator for the National Federation of the Blind (NFBUK), echoes Hallsworth’s concern. “If you’re older, blind or visually impaired, it’s easy to flick on a radio, it’s not easy for many people to access a website with reliable local news. A lot of people don’t have wi-fi.” Ofcom estimates more than a quarter of over-75s don’t have home internet access. “There was no public consultation,” she continues. “No equality impact assessments done, and no public value test done on any of the proposed changes.”

According to research conducted by NFBUK, in some weeks certain stations are broadcasting as many as 50 fewer hours of local programming compared to January 2023, a huge reduction. A similar study from the NUJ in West Yorkshire determined that schedule changes would breach Ofcom regulations.  

A BBC spokesperson says: “We consider all editorial changes very carefully and we fully appreciate BBC Local Radio is a lifeline to many. It is why we have kept all 39 Local Radio stations across England providing local news, sport and companionship. 

“The plans we have introduced aim to maintain the distinctiveness of our local services while allowing the BBC to adapt our offer as audiences change, ensuring we remain relevant to all licence fee payers.” They added that each local station will “meet or exceed” its Ofcom requirement for locally made programming.

In some areas community-run stations are filling some of the gaps. Keri Jones, manager of the volunteer-run ThisIsAlfred community radio project, creates daily shows for Shaftesbury, Dorset. He says that
a sense of connection has been lost: “Radio should have an almost social services sort of role. They feel a warmth from connection as a human voice is really powerful.”

Given the scale of the changes, this connection will take a long time to rebuild. 

Do you have a story to tell or opinions to share about this? We want to hear from you. Get in touch and tell us more.

This article is taken from The Big Issue magazine, which exists to give homeless, long-term unemployed and marginalised people the opportunity to earn an income. To support our work buy a copy!

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For more than a decade, Shaun Keaveny’s voice gently guided BBC Radio 6 Music listeners into the day. He was the laconic leader – but the key was always in the community he cultivated, the human connections formed across the radio waves (OK, digital transmitters).

More recently, Keaveny has experimented with a new form of listener-driven radio with his totally independent, Patreon-fuelled weekly show, Community Garden Radio. Freed from the shackles of BBC impartiality, he laid into the “cruelty” of the current government.

But he found himself exhausted by anger. This week, he has launched a new daily podcast, Shaun Keaveny’s Daily Grind. It will be an oasis, he hopes, for others who are struggling to maintain their mental wellbeing in a time of unrelenting horror. He hopes that – like The Big Issue – his new show will be a rebellion against the forces that would pit us against each other.

The Big Issue: I’m sorry but the first thing I have to ask is… a daily podcast – are you mad?

Shaun Keaveny: Oh, my God. I knew somebody was going to point this out. I’ve just started absolutely canning it myself. To be perfectly honest, the only way that this is going to work, is that I’m gifting the first part of every day to the gods of content. So everything that happens almost from when I wearily blinked my eyes open to about two o’clock in the afternoon: it’s all fair game. I’ve got to try and harvest as much stuff as I can in that time.

I just listened to your pilot episode, in which you realised it would take two weeks to do each edition of Shaun Keaveny’s Daily Grind…

That was a moment, I had a real dark night of the soul. I’ve been very temperate for quite a long time but I made a terrible mistake of going out for a few drinks the Friday before last. I got the beer fear on the Saturday morning. I was in a freefall panic, bolt upright at 6.50am. I just sort of sat at the laptop trying to bang out contingency plans or fake my own death. But you know, between myself and my genius producer Ben and the goodwill of the whatever audience we’ve got, I’m confident that we are going to create something at least mildly diverting.

You started by rummaging through some literal rubbish.

Ages ago, when I was at 6 [Music], I was talking to my good friend and producers there, trying to come up with ideas for the afternoon show. We had all kinds of daft ideas, none of which we brought to fruition. I have written down on a piece of paper – and I don’t think I was joking, either – Dry Stone Walling with Shaun Keaveny. Because, number one, I like being in nature; number two, I love dry stone walls. The other idea, slightly more seriously, was I think people chat better when they’re already doing something. When you’re doing something mundane, you feel a bit less under the microscope.

But what the litter-picking was all really about – I bought these litter picking devices two years ago on Amazon, I hadn’t used them. I thought, wait a minute, this is a golden opportunity here to use these. Who doesn’t like walking up and down the canal?

And you’re making the canal a bit nicer for everybody else.

I mean, we got a full bin bag in 40 minutes. It is only a tiny contribution to the planet’s woes, but it made me feel a little bit better.

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• As UFO sightings spike, Johnny Vaughan says the truth is out there

Talking about feeling a little bit better, you have promised to delve into the papers, which strikes me as not a brilliant way to feel better.

The news cycle now is so unbelievably sad and terrifying, with so much unimaginable human suffering going on all around, I personally find it very difficult to get through that.

The only thing that I have got in my armoury is to try and use my one slight talent, which is to give people something else to think about for a little bit. It’s not to say this stuff isn’t happening, or we should ignore it. It’s just a little oasis of silliness for a little while for us to catch our breath.

And so, it’s gonna be hard but we’re going to be picking out the real ‘and finally’ parts of the news that we can have a little bit of fun with. Those are the ones that we’re going to be using… with hilarious consequences, or at least mildly diverting consequences.

Are there serious things you want to talk about as well? Certainly on Twitter / X you’re quite political.

I don’t think there’s really any avoiding it. Our Community Garden Radio shows have been overtly political, to the point where I actually got myself burned out earlier this year, because I was so enraged with so many different things that are happening out there in the political sphere. A bit like a collapsing star at the middle of a galaxy, I just burnt out my fuel. Because it is kind of exhausting, isn’t it? If you’re always dealing with the inequalities and injustice you see being perpetrated, it can start driving you nuts, I think. I was going a bit crazy with it.

For my own mental health, I’ve kind of stepped – not away from it – but I’ve taken a step back from it to take a breath. I think what have been prepping to do with this podcast is make a nice space to be in, to try and bring the temperature down.

What is making you angry at the moment?

It would be disingenuous of me to pretend that I didn’t have an axe to grind – because I do. Where I come from, just about everybody that I know and love are of a very similar socio-political persuasion. We believe in social justice. We believe in helping people, rather than ignoring people who are in need.

We’ve been presided over for such a long time by people who seem to have normalised – they’ve almost made an artform out of blaming other people for shit. There’s a callousness and a cruelty to discourse in modern politics that makes me want to cry. It’s a difficult time for humans to be alive and to be trying to make sense of the world, because there’s so much info and a lot of it’s not particularly good for your mental health.

That’s one of the reasons why I’m trying to be a little bit more meditative. What can I do in the world that might make me feel a little bit better and a bit more connected to the human race?

In a time of callousness, there’s something rebellious in connecting with people.

I think that’s right. And I think that’s what Big Issue does. You don’t have to be Noam Chomsky to understand that what the big money, the big corporations, are interested in is atomising us and making us a little bit more frightened of each other, so they can make capital out of that fear and competition. What people like The Big Issue do so beautifully, is say: no, that’s not what we’re about. We’re about bringing people together.

You know, I’m being very, very highfalutin about a stupid daily podcast that might kill me. But if there’s any kind of ethos behind it, it is that.

We talked about politics there. A lot of people are saying we’re about to see the back of this government we’ve had for a long time. Would it be better if we didn’t have them and maybe had the other lot in for a while?

I honestly do think all you can really do is look at the facts. Look at the record, look at the things that have been enacted, the beliefs that have been inculcated over the last 13 years and draw your own conclusions. It’s easy for governments to say, we’ve had this financial crash and we’ve had Covid. Yeah, there have been unbelievable challenges.

But some of the some of the moral choices that have been made over the past few years, in our name, have sat very uncomfortably for me. And I just think, to be as apolitical about it as possible, just to look at it almost as a matter of physics… sometimes it’s just better to have a change and let somebody else have a go and hope there might be a change.

Maybe we’re not done with kindness yet. Maybe that’s not an outdated concept. Maybe it’s something that we actually really need. I’d love to see that implanted back into society a little bit.

What are you most looking forward to about Shaun Keaveny’s Daily Grind?

I’m really interested to explore what it’s like to connect our audience. It’s one of the slightly less obvious attributes of podcasts. A lot of the time they don’t use audience, it can very often be a one-way process. Whereas we’re really trying to get the audience involved. So I hope that works. But also just being out of the studio, whether it’s recording a chat with some huge star in a pub for our tax deductible pop quiz… I’m imagining Bob Dylan in the local beer and burger, you know?

Can he consider that an invite?

Listen, you can tell him from me: he won’t have to put his hand in his pocket. That’s an offer. Up to the value of 20 pounds sterling.

Really, what this podcast is mostly about, it’s just getting me out and about. I had a combination of being a bit older, having another child when I was in my late 40s, then Covid happening. And I think that psychologically, I felt like I’ve been imprisoned in one or two postcodes for most of my life for the past four years. So, pray for me and just hope that it works and it doesn’t land me in some kind of place for distressed radio presenters.

Shaun Keaveny’s Daily Grind is available to listen to on Global Player and all other major platforms.

Near the end of 2021, Danny Robins sat at a microphone in his shed and proclaimed his new podcast was going to be the “biggest investigation into the paranormal ever”. Amazingly, he turned out to be right. In the intervening year and a bit, Uncanny has attracted a global online community of inquisitive, engaged people with a shared interest in ghosts, UFOs, and all the strange things that go bump in the night.

Hundreds of them came together in real life at the UncannyCon in London, and more will gather at a series of live dates all over the UK later this year. Meanwhile in the digital space, Robins expanded his next spooky investigation into nine-part podcast The Witch Farm. On the West End stage, Robbins’ creepy play 2:22 A Ghost Story continues to play to packed houses. There’s even a television version of Uncanny being filmed for the BBC. Still often speaking from his shed, Robins is spearheading a multi-platform revolution in how we talk about things we cannot explain.

This week, fans’ entreaties have finally been answered – the Uncanny files are being reopened. The Big Issue caught up with Danny Robins just after the first episode of series two was released into our ears.

The Big Issue: It’s release day for the first episode of Uncanny’s second series – how are you feeling?

Danny Robins: It’s really nice to be back. There’s been such a clamour for more episodes. So it’s really nice to be able to deliver on that front and to basically stop people harassing me on Twitter.

I’ve lived with these stories for a while. The one coming out next week is one I think about almost every day, it keeps playing around in my thoughts. And so being able to share them and talk about them… it’s brilliant.

Give us a little taste of what we can expect in this series.

These are ordinary people with really extraordinary stories. And they are all stories – bar one – that you’ll never have heard of before, because they are stories that people are telling to me for the first time. In some cases, they’re stories that people haven’t even shared with their partner. They’re profound experiences and in pretty much every case, life-changing to some degree. 

We have apparitions of ghostly monks. We have a really interesting and disturbing and quite poignant poltergeist case that takes place in a family home in Stratford-upon-Avon. We have a story of strange beasts, so we’re delving into the realms of cryptozoology for the first time. We are looking at one well-known case, which is the Rendlesham UFO incident, which took place in 1980, and is one of the most celebrated UFO incidents in the UK.

We are also returning to some of the cases from last series as well. There will be an update on Room 611, for instance. I love the fact that some of these stories have gone from being just somebody emailing me to almost a classic British ghost story. Room 611, or Luibeilt are up there with the Enfield Poltergeist now, in terms of the interest around them, and the richness of them. 

I love the fact that the podcast has given a platform for these cases. We’ve got this kind of citizen journalism going on, that there are people coming forward and telling us their own experiences.

You started Uncanny by saying it was the biggest investigation into the paranormal ever, which was maybe slightly hyperbolic at the time… do you feel you’ve been proven right?

It was a bold statement that was potentially really hyperbolic, but was backed up by a hope that people would get on board. I love the fact that this thing that people have now called the ‘Uncanny Community’ has grown up. The idea of it being the biggest investigation ever: it kind of is true. There are thousands of people now around the world contributing to these cases, feeding in their data, their questions, their theories, their own experiences. 

I feel like we’re all on this adventure together. We’ve all got the same skin in the game: we’re all fascinated by what happens after we die.

The Big Issue: You’ve had a couple of in-person Uncanny events now. What have you learned about the Uncanny Community?

Danny Robins: I think what I’ve learned is that there is no single type of person interested in this. It runs a really broad spectrum of age and background. I get whole families of people coming down. I get people turning up with their eight-year-old kids.

I think it’s a sign of the times. We’re living through a moment where certain things to do with our society – Covid and climate change and war, all these things that make us question our mortality – are making us think about the subject more. So I feel like it’s tapping into a need in the audience.

Later in the year Uncanny’s going on tour round the UK. What can people expect?

It gives us a chance to dive into lots of smaller cases that previously were not getting used in the series. There’s so many lovely, one-hit-wonder stories. A really weird thing that happens to somebody one day.

Also, we use humour in the show. That’s really important because this could be an incredibly serious and upsetting subject looked at in one way, that idea of death.

We are dealing with a thing where there’s a fairly seismic rift between two sides of our audience: you either believe that the dead can come back to life, or you fundamentally don’t. It doesn’t get much more divided than that. It feels like that’s more divided than Brexit, really! Being able to bond and talk in a fun and easy-going way is important, I think. Society is so divided. So creating a space where people can have incredibly divided views, and yet get on, is great. The live events are where we really see that in action.

I love the fact that throughout the course of an evening, you might change your mind. You might arrive Team Sceptic, and leave Team Believer or vice versa. I just love that. I think the most underrated thing in our world right now, is the ability to keep an open mind.

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How’s the TV series coming?

We’re attempting to make it feel like the podcast on screen. But having more time – we have hour long episodes – and having more budget allows us to do things that we can’t in the podcast. We can go out on location, we can go to the places where the case has happened. We can conduct experiments to try and explore some of the sceptic theories in the show. 

Clearly, I’m telling a real story, but I’m employing lots of the techniques and devices of a horror movie. Any ghost story revolves around somebody who’s been really frightened telling you about their experience, and trying to make you feel frightened as well. Because the more frightened you feel, the more likely you are to believe that story. They need to convey to you that life-changing thing they felt.

Last time we spoke, you told us you want to believe. Since then, have you shifted at all towards either Team Sceptic or Team Believer?

I think as human beings, we always want to see evidence. So until the moment I actually witness that ghost myself, it will be very hard for me to say 100% I definitely believe ghosts exist. What I can say is that I don’t have answers for many, many, many, many, many things that I’m told. I listen to people tell these stories and I can’t come up with answers. And that unsettles me. 

I wouldn’t be making this programme unless I felt that the mysteries at the heart of it were inexplicable and troubling and worthy of deep investigation. And I guess that’s the thing that makes me get up every day – the hope that ghosts might be real, and the belief in the witnesses. When I look into the whites of their eyes, I believe totally that they have experienced the thing that they are telling me. 

So that’s about as close as I can come to saying, ‘I believe ghosts exist’. I believe that we don’t have an answer for these ghost stories. And that answer might be that ghosts exist.

Uncanny, hosted by award-winning writer and journalist Danny Robins is available on BBC Sounds and all good podcast platforms now.

Things will never be the same again. Ken Bruce, BBC Radio’s most popular broadcaster, is leaving after 37 years as the presenter of Radio 2’s mid-morning (9.30am to 12pm) show, along with what will surely be many of his loyal followers. He’s taking his hugely popular daily quiz PopMaster too.

From April 3, Bruce will be on Greatest Hits Radio at the slightly different time of 10am to 1pm.

It has been suggested that his newly announced replacement, northern showbiz perennial Vernon Kay, will present some kind of replacement music quiz as part of the new regime.

But it’s safe to say that for many, no matter what approach he takes, he will never come close to competing with Bruce’s easy charm. Let’s face it, no one could.

The music on Ken Bruce’s show has always been relatively unchallenging. Which is fine. The reason people tune in goes way beyond the music. Bruce’s avuncular, reassuring burr sways the dial in his direction – and then there’s the behemoth that is PopMaster.

This is a format that has struck a chord with the public. I have lost count of the number of friends who have told me that their work stops when it’s PopMaster time. Well, usually a few minutes before the 10:30am kick off so the kettle can be boiled ahead of our communal experience.

PopMaster

I write as a two-time PopMaster contestant. I had been encouraged by friends for years to have a go. I’m a trivia buff and a regular listener, like millions of others, and often scored the maximum 39 points on offer. So how hard could it be, eh?

After making it past the researchers by scoring full marks on my trial questions and charming them with my patter(!) – explaining I had a face very much designed for radio – my first time happened in late 2019. I remember it so clearly.

I chose ‘Let’s Build a Home’ as my bonus round but only got one of my three six-pointers. Unfortunately, my knowledge of Chairman of the Board’s early 1970s run of hits didn’t extend much beyond Give Me Just a Little More Time. And, sadly, Tasmin Archer’s 1994 Number 40 hit cover of Robert Wyatt’s Shipbuilding had also passed me by.

I ended up drawing 24-24. Then in the tiebreaker, my lack of interest in Engelbert Humperdinck‘s back catalogue was ruthlessly exposed. That’s showbiz.

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The cult of Ken

But my debut appearance uncovered the amount of love swilling around for Bruce.  I was invited to join a Facebook group that revealed the full extent of the ‘cult of Ken’. Beyond all the sympathetic messages I received, a further examination revealed that this group’s devotion went far beyond PopMaster. There were predictions about forthcoming shows, guessing the long song, comments about playlists, ruminations about contestant performances. These guys are all hardcore.

When Bruce tweeted that the BBC had asked him to leave on an earlier-then-expected date, the news of his hasty departure was met with fury, the loyalty towards the gentlest of broadcasters ironically bordering on the ferocious.

PopMaster attempt 2

Despite the Bruce Bunch’s well-meaning words, I felt chastened by my defeat. And I was determined to right a wrong. You have to wait at least two years to get back on PopMaster, but return I did in 2022. Again I got through my trial questions with full marks, and once on-air immediately bonded with Ken due to my (admittedly quite good) Paul McCartney anecdote. That seemed to tickle him to the extent that he responded with one of his own, and failed to ask me very much about myself, as is custom.

I eventually triumphed in a thriller. But, devastatingly for me, corpsed on the bonus Three in 10 – even though it was the relatively simple task of naming three Four Tops hits. After two then my mind went blank. I couldn’t even remember Reach Out.

I could feel Bruce’s reassuring but demanding presence keeping a keen eye on the clock. Although I didn’t want to let myself down, that’s what I felt I had done. It felt awful. Once it gets away from you, there’s very little time to reset your mind. And it’s harder than you think when you know that Ken Bruce is definitely listening.

What should have been a triumphant occasion (I had won, after all) felt like a failure. It wasn’t about the smart speaker. It’s never about the smart speaker. I didn’t even get to hear Bruce shout, as is custom, “AH! IT’S ONE YEAR OUT!!!” as I nailed my ‘in which year’ questions on both occasions.

Moving on

After that experience, I decided it was time to gracefully retire – from PopMaster at least. Never mind. I have my One Year Out T-shirt and Bluetooth headphones to placate me, as well as a lifelong frustration over what might have been.

It is nice to have been part of PopMaster history, especially now its time on Radio 2 is over. I am still asked about it when I bump into people I haven’t seen for a while. You can’t get away from it. That’s just how it is.

It’s now time for Ken Bruce to leave his hugely successful comfort zone after 37 years (save for a two-year break from 1990 to 1992). And who knows what awaits him in his new domain? Presumably a very nice salary for starters.

It remains to be seen whether this is the end of something or the beginning of something else. Or both. Whatever, one thing that’s clear is that for many, whatever happens, Ken will always be the master.

Your support changes lives. Find out how you can help us help more people by signing up for a subscription

A US warplane takes down a UFO off Alaska. The next day, Canadian and US planes are scrambled to destroy another just over the border in the Yukon Territory. The day after, another mysterious object appears over Montana, and is also shot down. Meanwhile, Chinese state media says they too have detected an unidentified flying object in their airspace. Understandably, these events – all of which happened over the course of last weekend – had many asking if we were being visited by aliens.

About half of the UK population believe aliens exist, according to a recent YouGov study, with 22 per cent saying they think extra-terrestrials have already visited Earth. Yet, if someone says they’ve actually seen a UFO, they’re most likely met with derision. Even more so if they say they’ve met a little green man. That’s the attitude the TV and radio presenter Johnny Vaughan – a man who coincidentally used to star in The Big Breakfast alongside ‘aliens’ Zig and Zag – wants to change.

In his new podcast Alien Kidnap Club, Vaughan listens to the real stories of people who have seen something they can’t explain – something they think is genuinely not of this world. He says it was his own “spooky” experience that opened his mind.

The Big Issue: I understand that you’ve actually seen a UFO yourself. Is that right?

Johnny Vaughan: Yes. Me and two friends, we saw something phenomenal. The fourth friend was asleep, and he’s still gutted to this day. I’d love to talk to you about, but it’s a real spoiler for the podcast. I can says it’s a really good story. I get my friend, who was also in the car then and I haven’t seen for years, to join in on the chat. I hadn’t primed him, because we never talked about it, because it’s quite spooky. I think you’ll find it a really interesting story. Because it is, and it’s absolutely true.

If we don’t want to be too spoilery, maybe you can tell me about the effect your UFO sighting had on you…

It made me think about the alien paradox. If you say to most people, do you believe there’s alien life? They’ll say yes. If they say yes, without any reason or proof, we think they’re sane. If they say yes, because they believe they have proof or they’ve actually witnessed something firsthand, we think they might be slightly crazy. Which is really odd.

Did your experience make you think that maybe those people aren’t crazy?

I tell you what: I know I’m not making it up. Neither are my friends. There could be a rational explanation other than extra-terrestrials – I’m yet to hear it or see it. And I’ve researched it. So, I’m more inclined to listen to people. We assume anyone who says they’ve seen anything alien must be a liar. Alien Kidnap Club talks to people who’ve had very experiences of otherworldly phenomenon and it gives them a platform where I don’t just say, ‘come on, who are you trying to kid?’ I pull up my interviewees and ask some questions, but I don’t just pull them apart. I assume they’re not liars. That’s my starting point.

Were there particular stories you came across in Alien Kidnap Club that really captivated you?

All of them are really compelling because they all talk about things that I’ve never experienced or seen, with the same sort of zeal as I talk about the experience I had. They’re out of this world, including people literally being taken into craft and seeing colours that they can’t describe to me, because they’re brand-new colours. They’re seeing brand-new shapes. It’s outside the physics of our world.

I hope this podcast will result in even more people coming forward to tell us what they’ve experienced because these are real stories. Some have encountered them a few times, some just once or twice, some are in regular contact with something. It’s compelling listening, it really is. 

As a public figure, do you feel any sense of worry about coming forward to talk about seeing a UFO? Do you worry people might think ‘Johnny Vaughan’s gone mad’?

No, because I come forward with an open mind. I’ve seen something really extraordinary. I had two friends that are with me and the three of us are able to talk about it. Hopefully other people will get a bit of strength from the fact that, ‘hey, I’m no longer treated like a crazed loner here’.

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If you did meet an alien, what message would you give them from humanity?

Buy The Big Issue. Say they arrive here in London. I’d say, if you really want to learn about us, look around you. Look at all these buildings. Look how much money there is here. And I’d say look at that man, selling that magazine. That’s because, would you believe, there are homeless people here, and he’s selling that magazine to try and help himself. And yet, people just walk past. That explains humanity. That’s pretty well all you need to know about us. Please help us.

Johnny Vaughan’s Alien Kidnap Club is available to listen to on Global player and every Wednesday on all podcast platforms.

@laurakaykelly

Laconic, irreverent, and fired by an overwhelming passion for music, Shaun Keaveny is one of the most loved DJs in the history of BBC 6 Music. A born broadcaster, his departure from the station in 2021 was never going to be the end. Since then, he’s launched a massively popular podcast and become a pioneer in the future of “listener-run” live radio.  

Following in the spiritual footsteps of Desert Island Discs (and like The Big Issue’s own The Music That Made Me), The Line-Up uses music chat to get the great and the good – from Johnny Marr and Joe Lycett to Self Esteem and Jodie Whittaker – to open up about their deepest desires and fears. Now in its fourth series, Keaveny’s podcast sees each of these celebs pick their dream line-up for a festival, the wilder and more imaginative the better. 

Each Friday, Keaveny also gets behind the mic to broadcast live on his own DIY station, Community Garden Radio. Going out direct to a band of paid subscribers through Patreon, it’s a “warm and fuzzy” broadcast community. 

The Big Issue: How did The Line-Up come about?

Shaun Keaveny: It was conceived of in the deepest, darkest depths of lockdown. It was born of that deep-seated sadness that a lot of us music fans carried around that time.

Obviously, since then, we’ve gone back to the fields in earnest, but we’ve got all kinds of other horrendous challenges around us. So, it’s just a great escape to get in a room with one of my favourite people. We are ostensibly talking about music and their favourite acts… and about 20 per cent of the discussions have been about that. The rest is an outpouring of either complete trivia, or we go incredibly, deeply emotional. Because that’s what music does, isn’t it? It takes us to those emotional places.

It’s like if you have a chat with somebody in the car, more seems to come out sometimes because the pressure’s off. You’re looking out the window, so your mind drifts off, and then you are talking about things you weren’t expecting to talk about.

I think the genius of Roy Plomley coming up with Desert Island Discs was exactly that. You can say: “why did you choose this song?” Which is an incredibly basic interview question. But then the next question can be: “so it reminds you of your mum when she died…?” And then all of a sudden, you’re in much deeper water.

I would be remiss to not turn the tables and ask you about your own dream festival line-up.

I’m old-school, and I am old. I like guitar music, and funk music, and rock music, and blues music, so it will be unsurprising stuff for me. It will be Frank Zappa and James Brown and Aretha Franklin. I would absolutely put The Cure as the headliners. I would have a host of top comic talent through the ages, shuffling on stage in between to introduce the next guests and do sketches. Maybe Laurel and Hardy, maybe Bill Hicks.

What’s your worst festival moment? 

I had some terrible experiences in Glastonbury in the ’90s. You know, the proper Battle of the Somme years where it was completely washed out? Sitting there, in your pants because everything else was wet, on a Saturday afternoon, playing cards in the tent in the rain, sweating. That thing where it’s cold, but it’s also really humid at the same time. And all you can hear in the background from the Pyramid Stage is Robbie fucking Williams. Then we had our tent broken into, then we decided to leave.

What are the advantages of doing it yourself versus your old job at 6 Music?

I’m a broadcaster. That’s the way I see it. I just love putting headphones on and hearing my voice. I do a thing called Community Garden Radio, which is like a Patreon radio show, every Friday. And that’s about the most free I’ve ever felt speaking into a microphone. We’ve built our own tiny little radio station and we broadcast to our little cabal of superfans. We can do whatever we want. We can play whatever music we want. I can write the most outlandish sketches and deliver them or swear, which is puerile but freeing. It’s like how I imagine Howard Stern must’ve felt in 1989. The freedom before certain strictures came in is very, very intoxicating. I love that.

I always hanker to go back to live radio, out there to the nation. And I’m actually doing it in January. I’m standing in for one of the biggest legends ever in radio, Johnny Walker, doing his rock show radio for four weeks. That’s the ultimate adrenaline thrill for me. One day in the future, I would love to get back to doing that on a daily basis.

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Can you be more political when you’re not on staff at the BBC?  

Yes. That’s one of the payoffs that you have to consider when you take a job like that. You can’t go around espousing your niche political view when you’re doing a breakfast show for a big corporation.

One of the great pleasures of the last year or so for me, has been the freedom of being able to speak my mind. I don’t for one minute think that it makes any difference. But it doesn’t matter, as a citizen, I really enjoy doing it. There are so many things that I feel really passionate about. And I feel like sometimes I want to say that.

The New Tory board game that’s sweeping the nation this Christmas: THICK OR EVIL?! https://t.co/P4SZu2Acrw

— Shaun Keaveny 💙 (@shaunwkeaveny) December 16, 2022

Having said that, discourse is virtually non-existent. It is a binfire of the vanities: everybody thinking that what they say is more important everybody else. I’m hoping that we are slowly moving to a better place with all that, but at the moment it’s like we’re at the bottom of the barrel, aren’t we? We couldn’t really get much worse than it is at the moment. But then we’ve been saying that for the last five years.

Are you sticking at Twitter for the moment? 

I’m staying around for the moment because I don’t have a viable option [to get] off. I still need to let people know about new things that I’ve done. And I’ve accidentally built up a few numbers on Twitter, so it’d probably be a little bit hara-kiri for me to just completely shut it.  

I’ve heard people that I love and respect big up Elon Musk and I have to disagree with them because there are no two ways of cutting the cake. He’s a deliberately divisive libertarian. The fact that he’s got his hands on a big part of everybody’s communication is not a positive development. So I am definitely going to be slowly edging away. 

You’re often compared to my one of my great heroes, Terry Wogan. Do you think he would be doing podcasts if he was still with us?

It’s such a kind thing to be put in the same paragraph as Terry. He took me under his wing when I started on the breakfast show at 6. He used to regularly come down and feed us carbohydrates. He was the ultimate human hug and the world just needs so much more of that. 

I guess he probably would have ended up doing a podcast on BBC Sounds and it would have been bloody brilliant. But he was a curious mix, Terry. He was he was a hard-working guy. But he was a smart-working guy. He just used to look at everything as, what’s the path of least resistance to get this job done really well? All the stories are true about how he got so good at being on the radio that he would just turn up with about nine minutes to go. His producer would just hand him a colossal pile of emails, he’d sit there with a big cup of coffee, start going through and away you go – that’s your show. That’s where you want to get to in life. Then you go home see your wife, see your kids, learn to play golf.

You’ve said before that you were confused about why the BBC let you go from your 6 Music show. Has it become clearer with time? 

Everything becomes clearer in time. It causes you a certain amount of grief when a big change happens to you. And then you give it a year, and you go, “Oh yeah, I should have seen that coming a mile off. It’s fine. Look at where we are now.” So I’m utterly sanguine about it. No hard feelings. The BBC gave me something unbelievable. They gave me a 14-year stretch in one of the hottest slots that you can imagine in the world of radio. There are no better places to work. So, how can you look back on that with any bitterness? I simply don’t. I feel it was a gift, and it’s still giving to me, so I’m pretty bloody lucky. 

The Line-Up With Shaun Keaveny is on all podcast platforms. Community Garden Radio broadcasts live every Friday, 1-3pm. communitygardenradio.co.uk 

This article is taken from The Big Issue magazine. If you cannot reach your local vendor, you can still click HERE to subscribe to The Big Issue today or give a gift subscription to a friend or family member. You can also purchase one-off issues from The Big Issue Shop or The Big Issue app, available now from the App Store or Google Play.

On the BBC Radio 1 Breakfast show, a Scottish listener called Gavin has called in to ask the nation whether it’s normal that he uses the same bath towel to dry the dishes, then himself, and then to wipe down the kitchen. Without washing it in between. “How many washing machine cycles are saved in my house by this process?” he asks host Greg James. 

To Gavin’s surprised disappointment, the UK is uniformly disgusted at him drying his bits then using the same towel on food preparation areas. “Grim”, “absolutely minging” and “this is why I don’t like eating at other people’s houses” are among the responses. James is delightedly leading the horrified mockery.  

This goes on for several minutes, until the towel deviant is suitably chastened. But then, just when he’s been shamed, Gavin signs off with a heartfelt message. “Greg,” he says. “Can I thank you? As someone who’s struggled with mental health, Radio 1 has really got me through some tough days.” 

It’s a perfect microcosm of what radio can be, Greg James tells The Big Issue the next day. “What an about-turn that phone call was!” he exclaims. “We were basically calling this guy a maniac. And then he turned around and said something so sweet.  

“That’s why radio is so amazing. That’s what real human conversation is like. You know, when you’re in the pub with your mate, and they tell you something devastatingly sad… 10 minutes later, you’re laughing about something stupid that you saw online.” 

Greg James joined BBC Radio 1 in 2007, presenting his first show the day after graduating from university. After stints in the early afternoon and on drivetime, he took over Radio 1 Breakfast from Nick Grimshaw in 2018. In the last four years, there have been a lot of tough days when listeners have needed someone to get them through. 

Throughout two years of Covid, during lockdowns when radio was one of the few ways we could feel that sense of togetherness, James had to get his listeners ready to face the day. He takes that responsibility, at the heart of a 4.85 million-strong community of people like Gavin (though perhaps without the same towel habits), very seriously.  

Your support changes lives. Find out how you can help us help more people by signing up for a subscription

“It’s all very well doing that show when everything’s great. But you’ve also got to be there when it’s not,” he says.  

“It was definitely difficult [during the pandemic]. But there were way harder jobs that were happening at that time. All I had to do was try and be as happy as possible at seven o’clock in the morning. Even though I wasn’t feeling it for a lot of the time.” 

In those moments, James says, “You remember the exact reason you got into radio, which is that it connects you directly with an audience. You’ve got a community. It’s live, it’s happening now, in that moment. There’s no other thing in the world, really, that is so accessible by the listeners.” 

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More recently, James had to deliver BBC Radio 1’s response to the death of Queen Elizabeth II – the only monarch the vast majority of his listeners will ever have known. “You gotta earn your money on days like that,” he admits.  

The Queen’s death was announced on the evening of September 8. Early the next morning, the Breakfast team put their heads together to work out what their listeners needed. “Not everyone was feeling exactly the same. So we were very careful to have a place for everyone to come together,” remembers James. “The only true thing at that moment was it was undoubtedly a historic, seismic event that affected the global news cycle, every TV screen, every billboard.  

“So our main thing was: OK, let’s reflect that. Let people have space to feel how they feel. You could feel very, very sad that you’ve lost this person that you thought was wonderful. It might remind you of a bereavement in your own family. Having that rolling coverage of a death is quite triggering for a lot of people. It’s anxiety-inducing.” 

James’s speech, offering a slice of comfort and normality and telling everyone “whatever you’re feeling today, it’s OK to feel those ways” drew huge praise across social media. You’ve got to pay attention to the listeners, he says, “They help us through as much as we help them.”

Throughout his time waking the nation, James has also found time to become a bestselling author. Alongside his friend, award-winning journalist and broadcaster Chris Smith, James created the Kid Normal series, a slapstick spoof superhero epic centred around the one boy who doesn’t have powers. They were determined not to half-arse it like some celebs, he insists. “We really wanted to do it properly because a lot of people who have a name get book deals, and sometimes they’re terrible.” 

The Kid Normal series has recently been followed by Super Ghost, another skewed take on the superhero genre from James and Smith. The tale begins with the death of Doctor Extraordinary, and the grief of his biggest fan Sonny Nelson. It gets weird when Doctor Ex returns as a ghost and only Sonny can see him. 

As when he’s presenting his radio show, James says it’s important to him to treat his young audience with respect, even when talking about difficult subjects. “We wanted to make sure that we wrote about death in a very realistic way,” he explains. 

“Not dancing around it, but also not being too morbid about it all. Death is a part of life, so it’s important to talk about.”

All James’s books are aimed at children aged eight to 12. It’s an age when it’s vital to fire their imaginations, like Roald Dahl’s Matilda did for a young Greg. The desire to power creativity is the same motivation that drew James in to becoming a judge for this year’s Christmas Kids Cover Competition. That, and the pull of The Big Issue itself. 

“I just love The Big Issue. I love everything that you stand for,” he says.   

“I buy the magazine from a guy called George at All Souls Church outside the BBC. I’ve known him for years. He’s an amazing bloke, we always have chats and he tells me about his life,” James adds. 

“The Big Issue is undoubtedly a brilliant thing. And I’m just very honoured to get to talk to you. I definitely think everyone should be buying The Big Issue and supporting it.”

Super Ghost by Greg James and Chris Smith, with illustrations by Amy Nguyen, is out now (Puffin, £12.99)

This article is taken from The Big Issue magazine. If you cannot reach your local vendor, you can still click HERE to subscribe to The Big Issue today or give a gift subscription to a friend or family member. You can also purchase one-off issues from The Big Issue Shop or The Big Issue app, available now from the App Store or Google Play.

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It started with the electricity bill. For an ordinary farmhouse in the Brecon Beacons, the annual charges would have come to £8,000. It was the late 80s, way before the current energy crisis. It was impossible by any normal means. In Danny Robins’ new podcast series, this chilling detail spirals into a ghost story that takes the real people at its heart to the “precipice between reality and insanity”. Was something supernatural draining energy from the house? 

Landing just in time for Halloween, The Witch Farm is the sequel to Danny Robins’ smash hit The Battersea Poltergeist, which examined creepy real-life happenings in the heart of London. The massive public response to that case inspired ghostly investigation series Uncanny, which took on a different story each week, all submitted by the online community flourishing around the show. 

“The Battersea Poltergeist pushed me to the brink of believing that ghosts exist. I would have considered myself a sceptic. And now I consider myself a sceptic who wants to believe and is teetering on that edge of belief,” says Robins. 

“I wanted to find a case that could push me over the edge, essentially. Then we found this case and it’s incredible. If the Battersea Poltergeist was described as Britain’s strangest haunting, I feel like this is Britain’s most terrifying haunting. It is like a plunge bath of pure terror.” 

Over eight episodes, through a mixture of eyewitness accounts, analysis and dramatic re-enactments starring Joseph Fiennes and Alexandra Roach, The Witch Farm tells Bill and Liz Rich’s story. In 1989, they moved their family to a remote farm in the Welsh mountains. It was “so bloody gorgeous,” Liz tells Robins. But soon things began to go wrong. There was that bizarre demand from the electricity company, and the family started to see and hear things they couldn’t – still can’t – explain.  

“There’s everything in this case: poltergeist activity, apparitions, alleged possession, physical injury. It’s so intense with phenomena,” says Danny Robins.  

Though Robins didn’t realise it at first, the detail about the electricity makes the story incredibly relevant today. “It’s a brilliantly timely moment to kick off a case at a time when we’re all genuinely feeling scared about our own energy bills,” he acknowledges. “Bill and Liz are torn between the fear of financial ruin, and the fear of the paranormal forces in the house.  

“Their finances go wrong, their animals die, work falls apart, their children get ill. Everything is going wrong, and there’s that sense of a life spiralling out of control. I think we live in times right now, where all of us feel on that precipice between stability and absolute chaos.” 

Throughout history, interest in ghosts has waxed and waned. It’s often at its height in eras of crisis and national insecurity. Times when we’ve felt death’s cold hand on our shoulders, and a wind of turmoil blowing through society. Previous spikes came after the first and second world wars.  

“I think you can definitely draw parallels between now and those post-war periods. And I think your key ingredients are a sense of chaos and uncertainty. I think we’ve absolutely got that at the moment,” says Robins. 

“We’re closer to death now than we have been since the second world war, really. We’ve got Covid, obviously; we’ve got the war in Ukraine; we’ve got climate change. We’ve got all these things that make us question our mortality.” 

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Danny Robins is open about what drives his interest in the supernatural. It’s fear. But not that the hauntings are real, rather it’s a terror that they aren’t. His “profound horrible fear of death” started in his early 20s when a panic attack began two years of chronic anxiety.  

“I thought every second that I was dying from a heart attack or a brain tumour. Every so often, in my lower moments, it kicks in again, and it’s so strong that I don’t think that it will ever dim,” he says. “The idea that ghosts are real is the antidote to that. And so it’s almost like I’m searching for the antidote to my poison.” 

As well as his collection of spooky hit podcasts, Robins has written a supernatural thriller for the stage. 2:22 A Ghost Story premiered in the West End in 2021, and received a Laurence Olivier Award nomination for Best New Play the following year. After years making comedy programmes, becoming the UK’s go-to ghost guy has been hugely fulfilling.  

“I think for a long time, we’ve not been very respectful of people talking about supernatural experiences,” says Robins. “The tendency is to either laugh at it or to question people’s sanity. But actually, if you take it seriously, it gets to the heart of human existence.” 

The Witch Farm is on Radio 4 and BBC Sounds from Monday October 17.