AS the nights draw in radio comes into its own. Disembodied voices whisper softly to you in the dark night. You can steep yourself in the news and despair at mankind or you can cast around for something else. Something other.

Last Sunday’s Between the Ears, for example, which offered a journey around Iceland and Icelandic folk stories, one full of trolls and ghosts and otherworldly landscapes. 

“Around us is a massive desert of hardened lava covered in layers of moss,” our guide, Andrea Kristinsdottir, a New York-based Icelandic sound designer and composer, tells us at the start of the journey. “The clouds are heavy and the land is flat, aside from the bubbling of moss, which varies from feeling thin and barely there to the softest duvet you’ve ever felt. Or like years of wax collected on an old bottle.”

That description is better than any picture, right?

Driving counter-clockwise around Iceland’s Route One (1322 kilometres in length), Kristinsdottir proved a softly-spoken but compelling radio companion, recording family members and those she meets along the way, all of them speaking in that gorgeous singsong Icelandic accent, all telling stories of loneliness, darkness and elves. The result was quietly thrilling. And best listened to with the lights out.

For a more traditional take on Halloween thrills Radio 4 welcomed the return of The Haunter of the Dark (Radio 4 Monday to Friday), the latest in Julian Simpson’s The Lovecraft Investigations which mix up occultists, “Hitler fanboys,” Brexiteers, witches, the great storm of 1987 and the secret history of the 20th century in its rich stew of story. 

As the series title suggests, this owes more than a little to the maggoty horror stories of HP Lovecraft, and if you haven’t followed the previous series of Simpson’s series you might feel a little lost trying to find your way through this latest 10-part series which continues on Radio 4 next week (all episodes are already available on BBC Sounds). There is, it’s true, an awful lot of exposition in pretty much every episode.

But it’s entertaining to lose yourself in its complex and maybe slightly silly depths. Simpson’s scripts are slyly funny and now and again use radio’s unique qualities to spook the listener.

In the second episode we hear laughter but none of the characters in the programme seem to, which proves pleasingly shivery.

More drama. On Tuesday Phyllis Logan turned up in Radio 4’s afternoon play Rehab, Philip Palmer’s Glasgow-based two-hander about the relationship over a five year period between a social worker with her own secrets (played by Logan, natch) and Finn (Brian Vernel), a repeat offender. 

Pullman’s drama was a thing of short, sharp scenes. Short to the point of abrupt at times. Even so, it rattled along and Logan clearly relished Palmer’s sparky dialogue: “Face facts, Finn,” she announced at one point, “you are a screw-up recidivist arsehole. There’s only so many ways I can paraphrase that.” 

The thought occurs. Is there a better Scottish actor than Logan?

Finally, the author Edward Brooke-Hitching was Cerys Matthews’s guest last Sunday morning on 6 Music talking of his new book Love: A Curious History in 50 Objects. He discussed with Matthews the first ever kiss, 18th-century lonely hearts ads, the armpits of rural Austrian women in the 19th century, the whereabouts of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s heart and love spells among other things.

He also played a recording of the brain waves of a woman in love. That woman was the scientist Ann Druyen who fell for fellow scientist Carl Sagan whilst working together on the golden record sent out into space onboard the Voyager spacecraft in 1977. She was head over heels in love with Sagan when she went for a brain scan. The result? Literally what love sounds like in our heads.

“The Voyager spacecraft has left the solar system and it’s winging its way deep into interstellar space,” Brooke-Hitching continued, “and it is thought that this spacecraft will outlive the human race. So, the last thing that will survive of us is this love story.”

There are worse epitaphs for the human race.

 

Listen Out For: Being Roman with Mary Beard, Radio 4, Wednesday, 11.30pm

Our favourite expert on ancient Rome (sorry Tom Holland) begins a new series which looks at the lives of six Roman citizens and asks what they can tell us about the world they lived in.