Novelist Andrew Martin writes well but speaks better. Railways are his passion and whenever I hear him on the radio I always imagine him telling a story to pass the time in some smoke-wreathed waiting room in York station. Like a school teacher nudged on to a favourite subject by homework-dodging kids, he appears to have all the time in the world. He describes himself as “a ghost fancier”, and in his pre-Halloween series of The Essay: The Further Realm (Weekdays, 10.45pm, Radio 3) he ponders the enduring joy of, as he puts it, “entertaining the idea of ghosts”.
An ideal ghost story, he says in the first episode, should only take a couple of minutes to tell. He likes the idea that these figures appear among us so that we might better appreciate life. The heyday of the ghost story, he argues, was 100 years ago, and the best ones came from the north of England. By Friday he is tutting over the decline of this tradition to the current confectionery fest where people must pretend to be frightened by “a bunch of six-year-olds pretending to be the undead”.
The camper side of Halloween is reflected in Iggy Pop’s Halloween Special (Friday, 7pm, 6 Music) in which he and film director John Waters share their favourite creepy classics like a couple of cackling geezers passing time on a porch and frightening the neighbourhood children. Their selections include the inevitable Monster Mash by Bobby “Boris” Pickett And The Crypt Kickers, Howlin’ Wolf’s Moanin’ At Midnight and Moulty by the Barbarians. Waters confides that it was listening to Clarence Frogman Henry’s Ain’t Got No Home that first made him suspect he might be gay. He also passes on the valuable information that, 50 years after his golden era, Clarence is still alive and can be found in the New Orleans phone book.
There’s further Halloween programming on Friday Night Is Music Night (Friday, 8pm, Radio 2), which features Craig Charles reading his own poem Scary Spider, set to music and played by the BBC Philharmonic.
Future Of The BBC: The Media Show Debate (Tuesday, 9.30pm, Radio 4) sees Steve Hewlett liberated from his usual Wednesday afternoon slot to referee a discussion from the BBC radio theatre. Representatives of the Corporation can expect no special favours from Hewlett, who can take a fairly robust line on some of their habitual hand-wringing.
The Book At Bedtime this week is the James Bond thriller Trigger Mortis (Weekdays, 10.45pm, Radio 4) written by Anthony Horowitz and read by Rupert Penry-Jones. This starts where Goldfinger left off, which I assumed was with James in the arms of Pussy Galore. In a helicopter.
Free Thinking: Festival Of Ideas is at the Sage in Gateshead again this year on the weekend just after Bonfire Night. I took part in it last year and enjoyed the range of voices tucked away in every corner of the Sage on panels, being interviewed or doing 10 minutes on their pet subjects. You should get along if you can. This year they’ve got Richard Dawkins, Sheila Hancock and Tariq Ali among many others. You may be too late to get tickets for the big names but allow me to point you in the direction of one of the sessions done by the young academics they call the New Generation Thinkers, who all present 20-minute lectures based on their current research. It’s remarkable how entertaining these can be. Everything that isn’t broadcast live on Radio 3 is being recorded for transmission in the near future.
