Danny Robins on Uncanny, the stage show, and his fascination with the paranormal
Everyone has an opinion on ghosts; it’s a guaranteed conversation opener. You might dismiss paranormal beliefs as nonsense – just people seeking attention, or exhibiting embarrassing levels of suggestibility, writes Philippa Davies.
Perhaps you do want to believe in human spirits existing after death in some way, but haven’t seen any evidence for it.
Or maybe you have experienced something you can’t explain, which has made you question all the supposed certainties about life, death and what lies beyond? Most people have their theories, but there’s a very wide spectrum of belief out there.
Danny Robins still isn’t sure whether ghosts exist – and he’s made a career out of it. Being unsure is the whole point of Uncanny – first the BBC radio podcast, launched in 2021, then the first stage show in 2023 and the jump to TV.
The latest touring theatre production, Uncanny: Fear of the Dark, comes to the Theatre Royal Plymouth in October, and is sold out.
Meanwhile, there’s been a second short series of Uncanny on BBC2, and the radio podcast has run for four seasons, along with ‘post mortem’ returns to earlier cases, live episodes, and Christmas / Halloween / summer specials.
The format is always the same. Someone’s witnessed or experienced something that seems impossible, supernatural, defying all the rules, and it’s scared and shaken them.
They describe what happened – sometimes years or decades after the event – and Danny enlists the knowledge of both sceptics and paranormal experts to explore the possibilities from all angles.
There’s no final consensus of opinion, and the audience are invited to make up their own minds about each individual case.
Uncanny’s Danny Robins: image kindly provided by Danny Robins’ team.
Getting sceptics and believers together
‘I think Uncanny is unusual,’ says Danny. ‘Most paranormal shows almost always cater to one or the other.’
‘You either kind of have those shows that very much preach to the converted and have people camping out in stately homes and castles trying to sort of spot ghosts, and getting mediums channelling spirits on command.’
‘The flip side of it is that idea of debunking the paranormal and pouring a huge tub of cold water on it, the sceptic approach.’
‘And so the idea of sitting in the middle and getting sceptics and believers together, and actually just listening to these stories in a non-judgmental way and not jumping-to-conclusions way, and saying that it’s okay to be unsure – I think that’s really important.’
‘It’s okay to say ‘I don’t know’ and to be in that kind of grey space between black and white. The uncertain nature of this whole thing, I think, is so important.’
‘And so, yeah, I mean, we’ve got the people who turn up and buy the Team Sceptic T-shirts and the people who turn up and buy the Team Believer T-shirts, and they’re often couples, or close friends. One’s a believer, one’s a sceptic.’
‘I just love it and I think, if we can agree to disagree, that’s a pretty good thing.’
‘We’re encouraged to be very opposed to each other at the moment. If you step out on social media, you will always see people arguing, taking one side or another.’
‘You’re encouraged to define yourself by what you disagree with, what you hate, who you’re opposed to. And actually, you don’t have to always be like that.’
Image: Zef Art / Shutterstock
The first Uncanny stage show
I went to see the first stage show, ‘Uncanny: I Know What I Saw’ in Exeter in 2023. I was a huge fan of the podcast, but less keen on the TV version (the first TV series had just begun).
Uncanny seemed ideal for an audio format, drawing upon the listener’s imagination; to me, the TV reconstructions weren’t nearly as effective, so I wondered how well Uncanny would lend itself to the theatre stage.
I wasn’t disappointed. The opening stage set evoked a sort of witchy haunted forest, with Danny’s famous garden shed, where he records his podcasts, recreated in the corner.
Appearing in his famous red anorak, Danny presented the stories in a down-to-earth, low-tech way, amid simple scenery.
There were no flash-bang moments or jump-scares – but every now and then, something would seem to have changed position without us having seen it move, or an object would appear where it should not have been.
Very simple to do on a theatre stage with all the tricks of the trade, but it still produced a slightly jarring feeling of unease. Not edge-of-your-set, but edge-of-your-mind.
The power to scare – and share
It sounds as if the new show will stick to the same format, with a whole new set of stories sent to Danny by members of the public – nothing that’s already been used in the podcast or on TV.
He says that, even after hearing and dramatising so many unsettling experiences, there are some stories that immediately grab him, making him want to investigate further, and share them with a wider audience.
‘It’s the ‘shiver down the spine’ test,’ he says. ‘People often ask me, ‘How long does it take me to decide on the story?’ And normally it’s instant.’
‘I read an email and there’s just something about it that sends a little frisson of fear through me.’
‘And then you talk to the person who it happened to, and you see the whites of their eyes, and you hear that little tremble in their voice, and you realise that they are still frightened often after maybe as long as 50 years. And for me, that’s a mystery I want to solve.’
‘I want to try and understand what could make an ordinary person – someone like you or me, who lives in an ordinary house – experience that level of fear in a place they should feel safe and comfortable.’
‘So I am drawn to these mysteries, but I’m drawn particularly to try and make sense of fear, because I think all of us as human beings fear fear, if that makes sense.’
‘Yet fear has kept us alive throughout the ages. It’s the thing that makes you outrun a predator. It’s the thing that sort of stops you from going into situations that might be the end of you.’
‘But then, when you experience that kind of incredible level of fear in a normal domestic environment, where does that come from? What is it in your house that is doing this? Is it that incredibly powerful thing – the human imagination?’
‘Is it something to do with your environment? Or is it that it is genuinely paranormal, something that sits outside of normal, that is in your house. and if so, how the hell do we explain that?’
Image: Raggedstone / Shutterstock
Stories never told before
‘I think the thing that I always feel is really powerful with Uncanny is that these are stories that quite often haven’t been told to anyone else before; that people just haven’t known how to talk about them, or where to talk about them.’
‘Sometimes I am the first person they feel comfortable telling them to. They haven’t even told their own partners about it.’
‘So, I always feel really privileged and honoured to have these stories in my possession and to try and help people make sense of them.’
‘And I think it says something quite powerful about the Uncanny audience, actually, that people feel comfortable sharing these stories with them as well.’
‘That’s one of the lovely things about the show, that it’s built up this great community around it.’
‘And all of us, whether we’re sceptics or believers, are all here for the same purpose: to try and listen to these stories and try and make sense of them.’
‘And as we go out on tour, just in the same way as with the podcast or TV series, we’ll be asking the audience to ask us their questions or share their theories on the night.’
‘You’ll be part of this audience trying to work out what the hell’s going on with these stories. If you want, you can actually tell us your stories as well. There’ll be a section of the show where you can tell us your own ghost stories.’
‘The stories that always set my pulse racing are the ones that come from somebody who says, ‘I don’t believe in ghosts, but I think I might have seen a ghost.’’
‘There’s something quite powerful really about somebody who’s forced to reassess their entire world view, their whole concept of the universe because of something they have seen or experienced.’
‘That’s something I feel keenly because I’ve always wanted to see a ghost, and yet I hear these stories and think ‘be careful what you wish for.’’
‘Because once you do have an experience like this, whether it’s a ghost or a UFO whatever it is, I think it totally changes you as a person and you can’t step back from that.’
‘Maybe you felt a level of fear you’ve never felt before, but certainly you it leaves you having a different understanding of the way the world works.’
‘If the dead really can come back to life and appear in front of you…then that fundamentally rewires our whole understanding of the universe. It’s a simultaneously frightening and exciting thing.’
Image: Raggedstone / Shutterstock
Danny’s ‘ghost play’ comes to Plymouth
While Uncanny is all about exploring other people’s experiences, Danny drew on his own perceptions of the paranormal when he created his stage play, ‘2:22 A Ghost Story.’
The drama comes to the Theatre Royal in February 2026 and – at the time of writing – there are still tickets available.
The play, which has achieved record-breaking success at five West End theatres, centres around a woman who believes her new home is haunted.
For several nights in a row, while her husband Sam is away, she’s been experiencing strange, disturbing phenomena at 2:22am. Sam is scornfully sceptical.
When the couple host their first dinner party, a discussion about ghosts develops, and they all decide to stay up until 2:22 to see what happens.
‘I think that Uncanny and 2:22 A Ghost Story come from the same place really,’ explains Danny.
‘This fascination I’ve always had; this tug between belief and scepticism that is at the heart of me.’
‘The fact that I desire to believe, I want to believe, and yet I find this little sceptic inside me kind of constantly pulling me back and making me search for the evidence.’
‘2:22 is such a personal story. It came out of so many very personal things for me and my own experiences, and then just to see what’s happened with it to see the kind of huge success that has grown out of it is very moving really.’
‘I find myself sitting in the theatre watching it and being sort of profoundly excited by it and still jumping at every scare.’
With both the Uncanny franchise and the play, Danny has certainly struck a chord with the public.
But, he says, he’s simply connecting with an awareness that’s always at the back of our minds – a need to look for answers, even if we don’t fully understand them.
‘I think there’s something about the times that we live in that make us particularly interested in this subject right now. We’ve lived through this very strange, unsettling era.’
‘We have the threat of climate change, we have war creeping ever closer to us.’
‘All these things make us question our mortality and think about the idea of what happens to us when we die. I think that just living in strange chaotic times makes you think about these things as well.’
‘I think the more frightening our own world becomes, the more we look to find another world beyond it.’
‘And you definitely see, in times of unrest, a real interest in the paranormal.’
‘You saw it back in the 1960s. You see it right back to Jacobean times, and certainly in the wake of the second world war.’
‘A huge boom of interest in the supernatural, people wanting to contact the dead, the invention of the Ouija board, the kind of era of mediums who were rock stars.’
‘There’s a hunger and a fervour, I think, for trying to understand this subject at the moment and I think what Uncanny does is treat the subject with a seriousness and intelligence, but it’s also fun.’
‘It’s entertaining, but it’s not just there to entertain you. The greatest detective story, the greatest mystery of all, asks: ‘What happens to us when we die?’’
