Uncanny, BBC 2, 9pm, Episode 1, ‘Miss Howard,’ presented by Danny Robbin, assisted by experts Evelyn Hollow and Ciarán James O'Keeffe, Director Joe Myerscough.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001rcl0/episodes/guide

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001rckl

I admit to having previous here. I listened to Danny Robbin and his team’s Podcast such as The Battersea Poltergeist, The Witch Farm and even one of his lesser known fares the Uncanny Podcast series, The Angel in the Bathroom. Danny Robbins has made the big time now he’s on prime time telly, well kinda, BBC2, but it is 9pm and that’s primetime scheduling.

(To really make the big time, he’d need to take us back a few years to the time when everybody, even those under thirty watched telly, at much the same time. He could make a programme about how my da ghosted me and never let me watch Star Trek.)

Ironically, when fewer bend the knee, or give lips service to conventional religion, interest in the paranormal has grown. When I now attend a humanist funerals,there’s always a jokey line that him or her will be looking down on us. Laughing, or having a drink, or doing whatever they were doing before they died. There’s even a Facebook page (I know there’s a Facebook page for everything) called Haunted Clydebank, which is even more popular that the Facebook page for Clydebank’s missing cats, who are up there looking down on us somewhere.  

Danny Robbins has tapped into an internet boom. Like Hughie Green in Opportunity Knocks, he throws it open ‘to you the viewer out there’.  

We step forward in our tens of thousands. I’d have binge watched the three-part Uncanny series on BBC 2, but it is restricted until it’s been shown on terrestrial telly.

Episode 1 has Danny investigating Miss Howard. She’s a ghost, or not a ghost, that lived in a house in Cambridgeshire at the beginning of the Twentieth Century, but was seen and felt by Cate as child who lived in the same house in the 1970s. Cate said she just knew the woman’s name was Miss Howard. Other children that lived in the same house verified they experienced much the same phenomena.

In other words, a bog-standard haunting.  It lacks the metaphysical pyrotechnics of, for example, The Witch Farm. No real frights.

Music carries mood. But unlike the Podcast series, there are some simulations of walking along darkened corridors and ghostly figures jutting out like creatures on a ghost train which detract from the shock value.    

Danny Robbins bounces around like a demented Little Red Riding Hood weighing the evidence for a wolf appearing. Psychologist, Ciarán James O'Keeffe is referred to as ‘team sceptic’. His job is to find a rational explanation for what has happened. He’s used this one before, fungal infections affect the brain, and makes a person hallucinate. They might think they’ve seen or experience something because they’re on the equivalent of magic mushrooms.

Robbins duly trots off and interviews an expert on fungal blooms in old buildings. His answers sounds convincing. But then when he trots out other side-effects that would leave the child, in this instance, in a wheelchair, dribbling, you think, maybe not.

Evelyn Hollow is ‘Team Believer,’ the parapsychologist. I’ve only heard her before and she looks like a witch. A couple of hundred years ago she’d have been burnt at the stake for her unorthodox beliefs. Well, maybe not. She dresses herself in science. What some would call pseudoscience. Occam’s razor. When all that is left is to belief in there’s something out there, she goes with the flow.

I’m usually with Hollow. I wouldn’t stay in any of these haunted houses. And you wouldn’t have got me anywhere near any Witch Farms for love nor money. I like to think of myself as a rationalist (OK, there’s no such thing when you’ve been brought up Catholic) but when it comes to facing ghosts we’re all just little kids shivering in the dark. That’s part of the appeal of horror movies and this series. Dream on.