Bovey Traces

This was an article for the theatre programme of the Saints Drama Society's production of Blithe Spirit (2025), co-written with Charlotte Ellingham. From the works of Shakespeare, Dickens and M. R. James to the horror films of Hammer and Hollywood, fictional ghosts are often portrayed as foreboding or frightening. However, although being chilled to the bone seems at odds with tickling the funny bone, there remains a grand tradition of comical ghost stories. A recurring theme of spooky comedy involves haunted people who “ain’t afraid of no ghost”. Short stories such as Oscar Wilde's The Canterville Ghost and H. G. Wells' The Inexperienced Ghost , as well as the film Beetlejuice (1988), all feature unconvincing apparitions that fail to scare the living. Even when ghosts' creepy credentials are found wanting, they can still irritate the living. The TV series Randall & Hopkirk (Deceased) , So Haunt Me and Ghosts all focus on earthbound spirits stuck in limbo, wa...

I haven’t updated this blog for several months, which is down to a combination of procrastination and being busy rehearsing for an amateur-dramatics production of Blithe Spirit . Ironically, it’s the latter that’s inspired me to write this latest post.  My latest adventures volunteering with my local am-dram group are something I would have never envisaged this time last year, when I was awaiting the results of a short course of chemotherapy. I had been diagnosed with an abdominal germ-cell tumour in January 2024, which came about following another type of voluntary work. A month earlier, I had been planning to return to Rugby Hospital Radio, to present a one-off 1980s Christmas show. A few days before the show, I had been experiencing painful abdominal cramps, which I’d put down to indigestion or an irritable stomach. However, the over-the-counter medication hadn’t worked, and after struggling to get through the three-hour radio show, I decided to go to the drop-in centre at St Cr...