Danny Robins was born in 1976 and raised in Newcastle upon Tyne. He started out as a standup comedian and went on to make TV and radio shows including Young Dracula for CBBC and The Museum of Everything for BBC Radio 4. The supernatural has dominated his recent work: the podcast series The Battersea Poltergeist, Uncanny and The Witch Farm, and his award-winning play 2.22, which is on in the West End and embarks on a UK-wide tour from 1 September. Robins’s new book, Into the Uncanny, is out on 14 September followed by his Uncanny live tour starting 10 October.
1. Theatre
Dear England, transferring to Prince Edward theatre, London, from 9 October
I took my 11-year-old son to see this at the National Theatre the other day. I was nervous about making him sit through a three-hour play but we both loved it. It charts the period from Gareth Southgate becoming England manager to the Qatar World Cup. It’s a brilliant analysis of toxic masculinity and the problems of English culture. Joseph Fiennes [who plays Southgate] is a real Rolls-Royce actor, and [writer] James Graham is brilliant at capturing moments in recent history that speak to our national identity. I had tears in my eyes by the end.
2. Music
This is my guilty pleasure. Ghost are a Swedish satanic metal band who are enormously popular – I’ve seen them play Wembley [Arena] – and yet most people I know haven’t heard of them. They’re theatrical and camp and have their tongues firmly in their cheeks – lead singer Tobias Forge dresses as a kind of satanic bishop with Kiss-style makeup – but the music is brilliant. As a kid who grew up with an unhealthy fascination in the occult, it really appeals. We could all do with a little bit more camp satanic metal in our lives.
3. Film
Host (dir Rob Savage)
I would make the bold claim that this is one of the best horror films ever made. It’s a Blair Witch for the pandemic era. Rob Savage is a really fascinating directorial talent – I’m sure he’ll go on to have a big career in horror. It was shot entirely on Zoom during the pandemic on a tiny budget, with all the actors locked down in their respective houses. It’s truly terrifying and pulls off the amazing trick of being scary without ever once using music, which is a special kind of witchcraft.
4. Book
This book kept coming up on my social media timeline. It’s a detective story set on Lindisfarne and it features a pagan, occult-obsessed serial killer (you’ll see there’s a theme to my interests). It has a lot of the cliches of detective fiction – a troubled detective falling in love with an attractive and intelligent academic who comes in to help him solve the case – and yet it’s gripping and exciting. And the setting really resonated with me as I spent many childhood weekends roaming the wilds of Northumberland.
5. Website
During lockdown my sons became the best of mates, and the thing that bonded them was Star Wars Lego. They just love it and I’ve loved discovering it with them. They found this website that helps them build their own battle scenes and ships. You type in all the random bricks you’ve got and it gives you different ideas of what to do with them, rather than being limited by what’s in a specific box. As long as you don’t mind your creation being all different colours, it’s great.
6. Restaurant
The Collab, Walthamstow, London E17
The Collab is somewhere we go to a lot as a family. It’s a burger and beer joint, basically, and it does a great burger – I would wholeheartedly recommend the buttermilk chicken – and brews its own beer. Sometimes it feels like every new restaurant in London does either burgers or pizza, so it becomes even more important to do it well. And The Collab does it really, really well. It’s a great restaurant to have on your doorstep and it’s somewhere you feel equally happy going to on a night out with friends or with your kids for lunch.
7. TV
Unforgotten (ITV)
Unforgotten is one of the best things on television full stop, and one of the best detective series I’ve ever watched. It’s about a team of people investigating cold case murders. It’s gone through a cast change recently but Nicola Walker and Sanjeev Bhaskar were the original stars. Walker is one of the most watchable actors on television and Bhaskar brings incredible warmth and naturalism. It’s easy to have a certain image in your head when you think of an ITV crime drama but this is mould-breaking and really powerful.
