“Boring”, “a non-event”, “an absolute waste of time”, “not a ghost hunt at all.”
These are the charges you’ll find, again and again, from some corners of paranormal television fandom reacting to Daisy May and Charlie Cooper’s BBC series NightWatch. It’s not that the Coopers set out to puncture ghost-hunting tropes. They didn’t. They made a cosy, slightly daft, sibling travelogue in spooky places as a Halloween-adjacent comedy-documentary that lets two very watchable people nose around prisons and pubs after dark while chatting, jumping at sounds, and occasionally waving a gadget about. Critics largely clocked the tone as warm, funny, light on spooks, while praising the sibling chemistry more than the spectres.
And yet, the backlash from some self-styled “serious” paranormal viewers and Very Professional ghost hunters is telling. The complaint isn’t that NightWatch fakes it, it’s that the show refuses to goose the audience with the familiar sugar rush – no overwrought demonology, no shouted confrontations in night-vision, no experts wheeled in for believer vs skeptic lip service, no endlessly looping “EVP” pareidolia. In other words: it’s “boring” because it isn’t performing hauntings hard enough.
As a former ghost hunter who has turned her hand to rational investigation of phenomena for the last couple of decades, I think that makes NightWatch one of the most unintentionally revealing paranormal shows in years.
Almost every modern ghost show is built on escalation. To keep ratings up, you must deliver “evidence” – lights flicker, meters spike, a presenter yelps in thermal cam, someone intones about “dark energy”, and then a skeptic pops up with a well timed “well, actually”. NightWatch, by contrast, is conspicuously under-engineered. Episodes take place in recognisably haunted “sets” – HMP Gloucester in the opening episode – but the narrative spine is the Coopers’ relationship, not a hunt for capital-P ‘Proof’. Reviewers called the premise “flimsy” and the execution “warm-hearted joy”, which is another way of saying the ghost hunt is set dressing for a character piece.
Deliciously, at least for a ghost geek like me, that framing accidentally provides a control: what happens when you remove the pressure to conjure a haunting on cue? Answer: you mostly get ambience, creaks, giggles, banter, nerves – and a sense of place. You also get space for ordinary causes to stay ordinary. I found myself cheering “Yes, Daisy!” when she casually pointed out that a light going off was likely just an electrical fault because of cold conditions, and not a poltergeist.
NightWatch does let itself down a little bit by dabbling in ghost hunting kit. You’ll clock “spirit radios,” crystals, mirror scrying, and, yes, a talking teddy used as a “trigger object,” a commercial device called BooBuddy that lights up and speaks when its sensors trip. The bear is a staple of ghost-hunting shops with its makers touting EMF, temperature, and motion detection wrapped in plush. It is also, let’s be honest, catnip for TV producers because it’s cute, audible, and visual.
But this is exactly where the show could get sharper without losing its charm. If you’re not going to lean into “results,” why lean into unscientific props at all? They siphon attention from the only genuinely interesting thing on screen – the human bit – while smuggling in unexamined claims – that EMF fluctuations cue the dead, or that the Estes Method offers controlled ghost communication. If your format is conversation-led curiosity, then own that, and cut the toy box.
When you dip into social chatter around the show you find a theme: viewers used to high-octane fare dismiss NightWatch as two celebs “freaking themselves out in the dark over nothing” and “Not scary at all”. Which is… kind of the point. Most nights, most places, most “vigils” amount to nothing beyond psychology plus environment. That’s what real-time, unjuiced ghost hunting looks like when you’re not chasing a story beat and a sting.
The comparison class here matters. Shows built on the Zak Bagans and Yvette Fielding school of televised dread reliably supply a plot every act: provocation, “evidence,” psychic muttering that amounts to nothing, peril, terror, catharsis. That demand curve reshapes the practice. Cameras and deadlines create incentives to mistake ambiguity for anomaly, and to treat any lull as a production problem to be solved by tech and narrative. NightWatch refuses the adrenaline drip and exposes, by contrast, just how performative mainstream ghost hunting has become.
As a woman from the West Country who used to go ghost hunting with my brother Charlie – yes really – I would watch series two of NightWatch in a heartbeat. It’s the closest thing I’ve seen on television that felt like my early ghost hunting days. It reminded me of nights spent in haunted pubs eating M&Ms and drinking coffee by the litre to keep ourselves awake, and resorting to rolling marbles along the floor of a haunted shopping centre to stave off the boredom that comes with genuine ghost hunting vigils. Although our aim to find ghost evidence was naive and biased, it was led by genuine curiosity, a shared sibling interest from growing up with spooky stories in a childhood home we believed to be haunted, and importantly, a lack of interest in the expensive ghost gadgets of the early 00s.
So, if I could nudge the Coopers for series two, I wouldn’t say “be more skeptical” – though I’d love a cameo from a building surveyor. I’d say: take your own vibe seriously. Drop the gadgeteering and run the sort of structured, low-distraction vigils that pre-date the ghost tech arms race. This would strengthen NightWatch as television, paradoxically, by giving shape to the quiet. Audiences would still get Daisy and Charlie’s chemistry, but with an investigative grammar that doesn’t constantly cue us to expect a “hit.”
There is a genuinely wonderful moment in episode three at Chillingham Castle, where Daisy May and Charlie have been hyped up about ghost stories by the property owner Sir Humphrey, only for the housekeeper, the next morning, to casually tell the Coopers that she has never seen any ghosts in all her time there. It’s an old house, she points out, it’s got a creaky roof. These are the moments that paranormal investigators, like me, live for. The people in the background with the real info about the ghost stories – the ones who quietly know the score. The castle housekeeper reminded me of a cafe assistant who once helped me crack a ghost mystery I’d been mulling over by telling me what her boss – whom she clearly hated – wasn’t sharing. This is the stuff that actually solves paranormal mysteries and you never see it on ghost hunting television. Until now.
Why does this matter? Skeptics often write about ghost TV as if the problem is only fakery or belief. NightWatch suggests another lever: format. When you derisk the need for eventful hauntings, you remove the narrative pressure that drives so much of the pseudo-forensics that haunts the format. That’s why critics comparing the show to Mortimer & Whitehouse: Gone Fishing aren’t wrong – the fishing isn’t the point, the friendship is. Here, the ghost hunt is the excuse to be together. That’s honest. The moment you stop pretending you’re on the cusp of Discovery-of-the-Century – I’m looking at you, Danny Robins – you stop teaching viewers the wrong lessons about how evidence works.
And the “boring” verdict? Allow me to translate: “This didn’t give me the adrenalised, jump-cut demonology I’m used to”. If that’s what you want, if you need an over-earnest television presenter to make you feel like your ghost beliefs are valid, it exists in vast quantities elsewhere. But it’s not an investigation, it’s a haunted-house ride with a tech sponsor or a merch line.
NightWatch is not a skeptical corrective, and it doesn’t need to be. It’s a gentle sibling hang in moody locations that, by refusing to manufacture dread, inadvertently exposes how contrived most ghost-hunting television really is. If the Coopers keep the curiosity and lose the props, they could make something quietly radical: a paranormal show that treats “nothing much happened” as an honest outcome and, on the good nights, lets the history and the humans be the story.
Until then, the viewers demanding more bangs and scares already have shows that cater to them and should stick to them, or open their minds a little. Radical idea, I know. If you find NightWatch “boring,” maybe the B-word you’re reaching for is “baseline”.
