For real chills, nothing is scarier than radio
What’s the spookiest thing that ever happened to you? The sound of footsteps on the landing in an empty house, perhaps, or the sudden, cold feeling of not being alone? Sometimes, the scariest moments are when we feel something without seeing it. Which is why, for real chills, nothing is scarier than radio. Radio is all about evoking the unseen; the official medium of things that go bump in the night.
This Hallowe’en was a particularly white-knuckle experience. Fear in the
Furrows (Radio 4, Thursday) was an extraordinary documentary by Simon Hollis all about the British tradition of folk horror and the terror of the unknown in the landscape, from films such as The Wicker Man to Alan Garner’s exquisite novel The Owl Service. Hollis spoke to artists of folk horror (including Garner himself) and people who take part in neo-pagan rituals to tap into a perceived ancient connection with the land.
Hollis joined a group of people celebrating Lammas on the first of August, known as the “devil’s day”, traditionally a time for sacrificial slaughter in anticipation of the harvest. Hollis stood nervously in the middle of a field, clutching his recording equipment and his notebook, while candles that had been made to look like corn cobs burned around a circle of people chanting “Blessed be”. He sounded thoroughly spooked. So was I.
It wasn’t just an exercise in spooky radio for Hallowe’en, however. Packed with ideas and eerie tangents, the programme was a deep critical excavation of why we’re unnerved by the countryside. With contributions from field folklorist Jonathan Huet, writer Adam Scovell and occult historian Gary Parsons, Hollis explored the cultural memory of places, and our fears that the land around us might remember the things that we try to forget: the bloodied hilltop sites of ancient massacres, for instance, or centuries-old trees once used to hang people accused of witchcraft. We tend to romanticise the British countryside as a nostalgic pastoral idyll, but deep down we understand that it probably knows something we don’t. Folk horror is largely built around this idea that the land could have a kind of sentience, and that it may not wish us well.
The programme also felt very politically relevant. As Hollis argued, confusing myth with soil is a fundamental error of nationalism, but folk horror is an ongoing attempt for us to work out our relationship with where we live and our responsibility towards it.
But Fear in the Furrows was so good because it wasn’t just a programme about spooky things, but a thoroughly creepy experience in itself. The half-hour ended with the bleak sound of crows, their cries spliced with a field recording of a neo-pagan ritual slaughtering of a “Jack in the Green”. We heard the sound of Hollis becoming part of the celebration, capturing a leaf that fell from the murdered character’s body. The chill it sent down my spine stayed all day.
Speaking of the uncanny, it was another very odd experience on Hallowe’en to hear the president of the United States phoning in to British radio. Donald Trump popped up on Nigel Farage’s LBC show on Thursday, and did so with the sort of crackly microphone quality that made him sound like someone ringing up to rant about potholes in Kent.
It was a massive coup for LBC to be able to patch in Trump on the day that we had all been told we would be leaving the European Union. It was a feat that no other broadcaster has managed: not Eddie Mair on the same station, and certainly not the BBC’S flagship news radio programme, Today on Radio 4. And Trump was on form, bizarrely claiming to have a “magic wand”; being critical of the prime minister’s Brexit deal; and disapproving of Jeremy Corbyn just in general.
In fact, Trump’s appearance turned out to be grim listening for pretty much everybody except Farage, but for us radio lovers that’s really neither here nor there: it was remarkable because this sort of thing just doesn’t happen on radio. Or it didn’t, until now. Trump’s appearance was two years of hard work in the planning by Christian Mitchell, the executive producer of Farage’s show, and it has changed everything. What does it mean for the future of the British radio phone-in? Will the Queen ring in to Jeremy Vine for a chat about dogwalking etiquette? Will Angela Merkel play Popmaster with Ken Bruce? One of the most thrilling things about radio, after all, is that you never really know what’s going to happen next.