After the controversy created by Ghostwatch in the 1990s. You would think BBC television would not want to go anywhere near something like Uncanny.
Based on Danny Robins Radio 4 series/podcast. This is not a television drama but a specialist documentary.
Danny Robins does not believe in ghosts but he would like to. He is also an actor, writer, comedian, journalist. He knows how the conventions of a television shows work and puts it into full use here.
Case 1 was brought to him by Kate. Growing up in a house in Melbourn, Cambridgeshire in the 1970s. She frequently saw a ghost of a woman dressed in Victorian clothes who she knew as Miss Howard. She is still haunted by this apparition.
Danny later comes across two sisters who have never met Kate. They too lived in the same house back in the 1960s and had an eerie encounter with a Victorian woman who they knew as Miss Howard.
This could be a spooky coincidence or maybe both Kate and the sisters remembered hearing when they were kids of the ghost of Miss Howard haunting the area.
Danny has experts which he divides into Team Believers and Team Sceptic. One of the sceptical experts thinks that the girls might have been hallucinating because of the spores from mould released in old houses.
As his investigation progresses, Danny diverts attention to a Canadian project of the 1970s called the Philip Experiment which examined the powers of suggestion. They had made up a fake ghost with a fake biography but people started to believe it was real.
Danny goes to Liverpool to look at time slips. Where at a certain street a man claimed to briefly travelled into the past.
Some of this was padding and the way the show was structured has all the conventions of a drama. Danny Robins will revisit the story in later episodes.
At least he is an engaging host but you do feel he is spinning things out. Hoping this type of genre will belong to him for the time being.