Danny Robins is an award-winning British writer, broadcaster and playwright best known as the creator and presenter of Uncanny, the BBC’s hugely successful podcast exploring the paranormal, which first aired in 2021 and has since been turned into a TV series, a US spinoff, stage shows, celebrity specials and books. He has been called “the UK’s go-to ghost guy” and his play 2:22 – A Ghost Story, which premiered in the West End in 2021 and won multiple Whatsonstage awards, including best actress for Lily Allen, has toured the UK, Australia, the US and beyond. 

His latest podcast series, Uncanny Cold Cases, is currently on BBC Sounds, and next week his live show Uncanny: Fear of the Dark culminates with two shows at Soho Theatre Walthamstow on 5 and 6 May in London. Next, he is turning his podcast The Witch Farm into a drama for BBC One starring Michael Socha and Gabrielle Creevy, and the second UncannyCon, an interactive day-long event for fans, is on 21 November at the ICC Birmingham. He was raised in Newcastle and now lives in east London with his wife and two sons.

(First published 1958; and in an English translation by Jesse Kirkwood in 2023)

My mum gave me this book for Christmas and I was initially a little suspicious – it seemed to be a Japanese detective story that hinged around the detective consulting lots of train timetables. But it's strangely addictive. For someone like me, who lives quite a stressful, adrenaline-filled life, it's beautifully meditative – like sitting in a nice, long, hot bath. It's about methodical police procedure, catching a criminal through the 1950s equivalent of Googling: going through endless reams of information, timetables, weather reports. There seems to be a real vogue for Japanese detective fiction at the moment – every time I go into a bookshop I see piles on the tables.

This book by Times journalist Ben Machell is gripping whether you know nothing about the paranormal or you’re an expert. It focuses on Tony Cornell, who was a very significant paranormal investigator working with the Society for Psychical Research (the world's oldest ghost-hunting group, founded in Victorian times and still going strong today). Cornell was not afraid to go against mainstream opinion – he went to the Enfield haunting and felt it was a hoax. But he also felt that he may have had paranormal experiences, and for anybody like me who's torn between belief and scepticism, he's a fascinating figure. Ben’s written a really dedicated study of this man's life to investigate why we're fascinated by the paranormal. It’s funny, reading ghost stories is a bit like taking drugs, your threshold changes – the more you expose yourself to them, the less scared you get. I used to lie in bed at night and get scared of the shadows and now when I find ghost stories that scare me I'm like, yes!

This is alt-folk, which is what we call folk music now, isn’t it? Like we don't feel comfortable enough to say “folk”. It’s hauntingly brilliant modern folk music. I like a tingle down my spine in many different ways and she provides that. It’s Katherine’s third album and the first single, Matches, is about witches and it really resonated with me because I’m currently writing a drama about witches. My parents were very into folk music – Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie, Christy Moore – they listened to a huge amount of it when I was growing up. I was introduced to Katherine as someone to possibly write the theme tune for Uncanny Cold Cases, our new series, and as soon as I heard her voice I said yes. She’s also just done the music for new Netflix series Unchosen.

People often ask me where I get the clothes I wear on telly from and the answer is normally Super Superficial. It's a little clothes shop in Covent Garden in London, tiny little place, just by Seven Dials. They sell well-made and inexpensive T-shirts and sweatshirts that have designs by artists that are bold and eyecatching: there’s one with a fox, lots with cats. I started buying them probably 10-15 years ago, and wear them constantly. Now, when I go on tour, I see people wearing the same cat sweatshirt as me queuing up to meet me, and I wish I had shares in the company! In fact, people dressing up as me has become a bit of a thing, especially on Halloween and World Book Day: people, even kids, wearing the T-shirts and my red coat. It’s funny because the clothes weren't conscious decisions: I first wore that red coat for a photoshoot because it was cold, so I put my coat on. That's the heart of Uncanny in a way – I didn't plan this big social media community that's grown out of it, it evolved from people enjoying the show and having a connection.

This is undoubtedly the best thing I've seen at the theatre for ages. It's breathtaking. I went with the family – they really enjoyed it. I was a kid who fell in love with the magic of theatre from a very early age and it still moves me in a way that cinema and TV don't. It's harder and harder these days to impress kids in the way that I was impressed, but Paddington comes as close as anything possibly could. It’s just delicious. It's also kind and optimistic, and all of those things that we want our art to be in this scary, nihilistic, pessimistic age. It just won so many Olivier awards. My one problem with it, and with all theatre at the moment – and something that I keep lobbying for theatre producers to address – is how much the tickets cost. Theatre should be the cost of a meal out – that's the way to fill theatres, and to make sure that the next generation wants to go. If going to the theatre is the cost of a holiday, then it becomes incredibly exclusive – a luxury item.

Interview by Imogen Carter