Haunted tales impressed Danny Robins’ play – ‘I discovered ghosts’
Cheryl Cole and Louise Ford in 2:22 A Ghost Story (Image: Helen Murray)
Television exhibits about paranormal exercise are likely to veer into near-hysteria. Witness Living TV’s Most Haunted from the early noughties when Yvette Fielding screamed her means round a sequence of spooky manor homes.
But when supernatural investigations create spectacles fairly than discovering spectres, they gasoline the concept individuals who see ghosts are, effectively, loopy.
Which irritates Danny Robins, the award-winning author of the Laurence Olivier-nominated West End play 2:22 A Ghost Story, which has starred Lily Allen and Cheryl Cole, and the favored BBC podcasts, The Battersea Poltergeist and Uncanny. Indeed, this go-to ghosts man is intent on returning stability to the dialog.
“For a long time, we haven’t talked about ghosts in a respectful way,” he says. “People who had things happen to them or UFO encounters were dismissed. They were laughed at, mocked and maybe had their mental health questioned.
“So for people to feel there’s now a community that will listen and not judge – I’m so pleased and proud to have created that.”
Isobel David, Danny Robins, Charlie Parsons and Kater Gordon (Image: Getty)
Robins got here to prominence because of 2021’s The Battersea Poltergeist, chronicling the real-life ghostly happenings in a south London residence. It clocked up hundreds of thousands of downloads throughout lockdown.
His follow-up, Uncanny, telling tales of paranormal encounters, has notched up 10 million listens on BBC Sounds, with a UK tour and a TV model arriving this autumn.
Robins’ boyish enthusiasm is infectious, however it’s his balanced tone that underpins his success.
His interviewees are usually “hardcore rational sceptics” or individuals who have been “blindsided” by a chilling expertise.
Uncanny’s hottest story includes an “evil” spirit that terrorised a geneticist and his roommate in 1981 at a Belfast University scholar residence. Other folks later got here ahead with accounts of apparitions and loud noises earlier than the constructing’s demolition in 2004.
“It’s well on its way to becoming a classic British haunting,” the 46-year-old smiles.
The Battersea Poltergeist options Shirley Hitchings’ (Image: Daily Mirror)
But don’t mistake ghosts as completely a factor of the previous. There was an increase in sightings through the pandemic, which Robins believes was a response to a way of mortality not felt for the reason that Second World War.
“Now we’re faced with this existential threat of climate change and war in Europe,” he continues. “You can draw parallels with the earlier wars when people got interested in the supernatural to explain societal chaos, uncertainty and death.”
He depends on intuition to resolve which tales to debate.
“Does it send a shiver down my spine? Does it surprise me? The stories that make my heart race are the ones where somebody begins: ‘I don’t believe in ghosts’ – after they’ve seen a ghost.”
While he’s not discovered the “definitive proof” but, he would like to imagine they’re actual. “I love the idea that there is magic out there – another layer of existence – and that death is not the end.”
During his early twenties, he had what he believed was a near-death expertise when he mistook a panic assault for a coronary heart assault and envisioned angels. Afterwards, he developed a profound worry of demise. “It was a scary, horrible moment that haunts me until this day,” he admits.
Danny turned hooked on ghosts (Image: Getty)
“Literally every second of every day I thought I was dying. That still resides in me.” He first turned hooked on ghosts rising up in Newcastle.
His mom, raised by religious Catholics, was an atheist and his fascination with religion was ignited by his spiritual grandparents. “Some people found God, and I found ghosts,” he causes.
For years, he noticed them as enjoyable figures, like Jedis or hobbits, till a buddy instructed him her convincing ghost story, which impressed him to write down 2:22 A Ghost Story.
Lily Allen launched the present in the summertime of 2021. It’s set in a haunted Victorian residence, with 4 characters, together with a sleep-deprived new mum, arguing about religion, love and sophistication because the clock ticks inevitably in the direction of 2:22am.
After its record-breaking 5 transfers in London, it lands on Broadway subsequent 12 months. “It was such a huge risk: the producers were putting on a new play with a new playwright with an actress who had never acted before – Lily Allen,” Robins remembers.
“And it was a ghost story, a genre critics can be sniffy about. There were so many things set up for it to fail.”
Lily Allen launched the present in the summertime of 2021 (Image: PA)
After performing in a college sketch group with comic Marcus Brigstocke, he spent twenty years as a jobbing comic so he’s having fun with his new fame as Britain’s go-to ghost man.
He works primarily in his backyard shed as a result of his Swedish spouse Eva and his two boys, Leo, 10, and Max, seven, all hate ghosts.
“There was an eight-year-old at one of my conventions. I told my kids, ‘He loves ghosts and my podcasts – why can’t you?!”
Now he’s writing a ebook concerning the paranormal and is happy to deliver Uncanny to BBC Two. His religious followers have warned him: “Don’t screw it up!” He’s unlikely to… so long as he retains satisfying the believers and the sceptics.
“No one else out there is bringing those people together,” he provides. “I’m just excited about telling properly scary ghost stories in an intelligent way.”
- Uncanny excursions UK venues from October 10 to December 1 with tickets out there through uncannylive.com; 2:22 A Ghost Story is on the Apollo Theatre and excursions from September 1, go to 222aghoststory.com