Radio Review: 22 August

I have my colleague, Victor Olliver, to thank for suggesting that I listen to the first edition of The Shared Experience, transmitted originally last December and repeated last week. In it, Fi Glover (whose book on radio, I Am An Oil Tanker, is something no home should be without), spoke to four people who had in common the fact that they had all seen ghosts.

I was particularly taken with the angler who saw an apparition on a pier at 4.30 one morning. As soon as the ghost disappeared, he reeled in an eight-pound conger eel. He said that ghosts tend not to appear to large groups because they don’t like being laughed at.

One of the other chaps on the show doesn’t believe in ghosts, despite sharing his house for years with an apparition who played Chopin on the piano daily at 1am. The playing stopped when a stranger gave him a painting of a woman playing the piano in a room that was quite clearly the drawing room of his house. The belief of this selfproclaimed ‘practical man’ was that people become part of the fabric of the buildings in which they live. They’re not ghosts. It is the bricks remembering.

For what it’s worth, I don’t believe in ghosts either, but many things are inexplicable (being unable to find a set of keys, for instance, then locating them in a place I know I had looked before) and I wouldn’t mock anyone claiming to have seen one. The show has no introduction or links, and the people are given a fair hearing, which is refreshing in an increasingly judgemental and prescriptive world. It’s just a half-hour of people talking to each other, almost like a support group, and it works well.

The Shared Experience, Mondays, Radio 4, 11.30pm.
Louis on Twitter: @LFBarfe or email: wireless@cheeseford.net