The Witch Farm (Radio 4) | BBC Sounds
File on 4: Is the Patient Breathing? (Radio 4) | BBC Sounds
The Martin Lewis Podcast (Radio 5 Live) | BBC Sounds
It’s not Halloween quite yet, though if you’re in search of a horror show, you know where to find it. The Conservative frontbenches, boom-tish! And appropriately, as it turns out, Liz Truss gave a spine-chilling impression of a dead woman walking in her interview with the BBC’s political editor, Chris Mason, sampled generously across BBC radio on Tuesday morning. Truss has an exceptionally dull speaking voice, as though she’s fading into the background, bored by what she’s saying before she actually says it. Scary.
And if you’re after some more unwanted ghostly presences, Danny Robins is back with a new Radio 4 series and podcast, The Witch Farm. Yes, the audio king of true-life scary tales has unearthed another it-actually-happened haunting. In 1989, young couple Liz and Bill Rich move to Heol Fanog, a remote cottage in the Brecon Beacons. In the show, the couple are played nicely by Alexandra Roach and Joseph Fiennes, though I did blench when Liz declared that she could feel her unborn child kick at three months pregnant. That really would be creepy. But the proper house-based spookiness starts after she has the child, and the audio effects are suitably realistic and scary: running footsteps (in empty corridors), loud banging (when no one is there), door slamming (when the door didn’t move)…
The Witch Farm follows the template Robins set in The Battersea Poltergeist: he reports the tale in an engagingly excitable manner; scenes are recreated by actors; two parapsychologists, Evelyn Hollow and Ciarán O’Keeffe, analyse what we’ve just heard; listeners are asked to contribute their theories. In such a way, a single spooky story can be stretched across several enjoyable episodes.
And it is enjoyable. Perhaps it was predictable that a gruff local would tell the Riches that their cottage was built from the stones of destroyed graves, but there are two more unexpected factors that hook you into the next episode. First, the Riches’ electricity bill: why is it so huge? They discover that when the spookiness is occurring, the electricity drains out of the cottage at such a pace that the numbers on the electricity meter actually whizz around. And second, the introduction, at the end of this episode, of the real-life Liz Rich. In later shows, Robins will be taking her back to Heol Fanog. Good (spooky) stuff.
The Witch Farm wasn’t the scariest thing I heard last week, though. That, sadly, was File on 4: Is the Patient Breathing?, in which reporter Rachel Stonehouse took a look at the state of the ambulance service in the UK. Listening, I found myself rigid with fear.
Stonehouse followed two paramedics as they worked their shift. Their calm, unflappable warmth and professionalism was interspersed with audio from people across the UK who’ve had to wait for hours for ambulances to arrive, with sadly predictable consequences. Hearing their phone calls – their politeness to the call handler, their reasonableness: “Oh, I know you’re busy,” said one – was both heartbreaking and completely terrifying. People are dying because ambulances don’t get to them. Ambulances don’t get there because they’re in queues outside hospitals. The queues don’t move because the beds are full. Sometimes, paramedics – highly trained medical professionals – spend an entire shift waiting. In August this year, in England alone, handover delays meant we lost 138,000 paramedic hours.
We hear the consequences. A family describes their devastation at losing a father who would have been saved if an ambulance had arrived within, say, 10 hours of their first 999 call. A man talks about how his back was broken because no ambulance came, so his wife drove him to hospital and he had a seizure on the way. This show made me cry. It’s an absolute must-hear, especially for any ghouls who might think that the way out of this omnishambles is to impose more budget cuts upon our beleaguered public services.
Have a cup of tea and calm down for a bit, because I’ve got some extra scares for you! The bumptious, likable money-saving expert Martin Lewis has a regular slot on Nihal Arthanayake’s 5 Live show, and this has been repackaged in the past few weeks as a fun podcast, The Martin Lewis Podcast. Last week, Lewis delivered sage words on the mortgage crisis, started for no real reason by our soon to be ex-prime minister corpse bride. Lewis is a great listen. He’s upbeat, clear and fun to hear, even when what he’s talking about is serious. Though he can’t give direct advice (he’s not allowed to), he turns listeners’ problems into realistic risk assessments so that they can make better decisions. Thus the scary stuff seems manageable, even when you’re spooked out of your wits. Somehow, in these strange times, Lewis is the ghostbuster we need.
