Radio Listener by Jim Gilchrist

Two weeks to go until Hallowe’en, but things are already going bump in the night as Radio 4’s Afternoon Play spot presents three chilling dramas for your trembling delectation in ALL THE DARK CORNERS.

It opens with Andrew Readman’s play “The Desk”, in which a TV dramatist with aspirations to be a novelist buys the ideal desk on which to write his masterpiece. The book is a big success ... but at what price? Subsequently, Paul Cornell’s “Something in the Water” concerns a sceptical scientist’s encounter with the lake monster he doesn’t believe in, while “The Dying Wish”, by Rosemary Kay concerns one of those good old fashioned occult rituals that never quite go according to plan, with dire consequences.

And if, after all that, you’re still of a mind to consider just what it is in such tales that scares us, THE SOUND OF FEAR finds Sean Street lending an ear to the noises and the music that can generate near-unbearable suspense, or genuine creepiness, from the classic creaking door to those sawing strings in Bernard Herrmann’s score for Psycho. In the process, he talks to film-maker Chu-Li Shrewring, and neuro-scientist Sophie Scott, who explains just what happens in the human brain when someone puts the frighteners on us.

There should be plenty of such suspenseful moments in Radio 4 Extra’s Spy Season, a fortnight of espionage and intrigue to mark the 80th birthday of John Le Carré, the latest film version of whose Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is currently receiving much critical acclaim.

The season includes a three-part dramatisation of another Le Carré masterpiece, THE HONOURABLE SCHOOLBOY, a new, serialised reading by Mark Gatiss of his spy drama bLACK BUTTERFLY and incongruous though it may seem, that old chestnut THE GHOST TRAIN, a spooky tale penned by the unlikely hand of Arnold Ridley, better known as the gently dithering Private Godfrey in Dad’s Army.