Danny Robins of Uncanny: ‘I know what I saw’
Danny Robins is the award-winning podcast presenter of hugely popular The Battersea Poltergeist and the paranormal series Uncanny. His record-breaking play, 2:22 A Ghost Story comes to Richmond Theatre in February. He talked to Pippa Duncan about the extraordinary last few years as he’s become a leading voice in contemporary ghost stories
Are you Team Believer or Team Sceptic?’ Danny Robins asks his audience in every episode of his Uncanny podcast, detailing unexplained paranormal experiences. He presents witness testimony, expert analysis, conflicting theories and invites the audience to judge whether the haunting claims withstand scrutiny.
Uncanny, The Battersea Poltergeist and his play 2:22 A Ghost Story have catapulted Robins into a totally unexpected level of fame. Up until 2021, his writing and broadcast career was successful, but mostly under the radar. In his younger years, he was part of the National Youth Theatre, was one of the trio of ‘Club Seals’ with comedians Marcus Brigstocke and Dan Tetsell at Bristol University and since then has had many writing credits, including co-writing the Lenny Henry BBC R4 sit-com, Rudy’s Rare Records, as well as a number of plays and shows for TV and radio.
So how did his ghost-centred career start, I ask him. ‘I’ve been fixated by ghosts since I was a kid. There have just been all these moments in my life where I found ghost stories incredibly gripping and I just kept coming back to them. I’ve made a few documentaries about them over the years and did a comedy show at the Edinburgh festival which was a parody of Most Haunted. It’s just something that has grown in this lovely, organic way. Making The Battersea Poltergeist for the BBC was the first time I’d made something that was just the sort of thing I wanted to listen to. I’d made documentaries, I’d written dramas, I’d been interested in ghosts, I liked being funny – and so all of these things fed into this programme that created something that was quite different and unique and it resonated with people.’
This led him on to create the Uncanny podcast series and was followed by his play, 2:22 A Ghost Story, which debuted in 2021, with Lily Allen winning an award for her role in 2022.
‘The play came very specifically from a conversation I had with a friend. She told me she’d seen a ghost and, for some reason, I instantly believed her. She explained it as a really vivid experience in a very normal environment. I was really struck by thinking how our friends would react to her – how some people would believe her, but others would mock her and some would think she’s crazy. I felt if you could take all these reactions and distil them into a relationship, then that’s a really powerful thing to throw into a couple’s lives if the person you love doesn’t believe you.’
The play sees Jenny believing her new home is haunted, but her husband Sam isn’t having any of it. An argument ensues when they have their first dinner guests. As belief and scepticism clash, there is something that does feel oddly frightening. So they stay up – until 2:22 – to wait and see what happens.
Over the years Robins has changed his views from sceptical to very much open-minded about ghosts. ‘You can’t listen to the amount of stories I’ve listened to and not find it chip away at you a bit. I haven’t had an experience myself and I haven’t come across anything which I feel is definitive, but I love the idea.’
I ask him if there’s one story that he really just can’t explain? My Best Friend’s Ghost, he says. A woman loses a friend to cancer. She thinks she later sees her ghost, but dismisses it as her imagination. But many years later she watches a medium in a village hall for fun. She thought it was all rubbish, but as she was leaving, the medium comes up to her privately and says: ’I didn’t want to say it on stage, she told me not to, but…’ and then tells her the exact dying words of her friend. He says, ‘Every way I look at that story, I find it incredibly hard to explain. Nobody in a million years could have guessed what she said. It really lingers with me.’
He treads carefully when people share their experiences, feeling sometimes like a therapist, as if the storyteller is in a safe space to talk about what happened to them. Some people have carried their secret for years. Robins no longer needs to approach people for stories – he gets thousands of emails from across the world. Even academics have approached him, asking to tap into the stories he has accumulated, because ‘it’s like a census of ghost experiences.’ No one else has managed to collect so much information about the subject.
He loves the idea that death – the one thing he is truly afraid of – is not the end, that there is a way to keep in touch with loved ones.
Would he like to come back as a ghost? ‘I’d love to, I mean I think for me it’s the whole reason I’m interested in this subject. But,you know, you have to be careful what you wish for…’
2:22 A Ghost Story is at Richmond Theatre, 2-7 February. atgtickets.com
Danny Robins is touring with his stage show, Uncanny – Fear of the Dark and will be at the London Palladium on 11 March. Tickets from uncannylive.com
Find out what else is on locally here.