大象传媒

What does night-time represent to you? Is it comfort, cosiness and welcome solitude? Does it flash past unnoticed, masked by a blanket of sleep the second your head hits the pillow?

With darkness can come a dreaded stretch of restlessness when demons, doubts, future fears and unanswered questions jostle for attention behind the eyelids. Jarvis Cocker’s Wireless Nights explores the human condition after dark, telling the stories of night dwellers who emerge while we rest. For these people, the rising of the moon marks time to spring into action; they are not just nightclub revellers and insomniacs, but nocturnal workers whose jobs can only be done after dark. For them, it is not the dead of night, but the life.

Here, we discover some of the most unusual nocturnal jobs - and what it takes to do them.

If we awake from a frightening dream in the early hours, we take for granted our bedside lamps which, at the flick of a switch, can bring reassurance that the imposing shadowy forms we see are nothing more sinister than our furniture. Likewise we can rely on our computers when working late into the night, or radios and television for evening entertainment.

On Lundy, an island that sits solitarily off the north coast of Devon (population 27), there is not the continual, reassuring supply of electricity we have fed into our homes by the National Grid. Instead, their power is courtesy of two generators.

These are tended to by engineer Roger, who ended up in Lundy after a desire for change when he realised he was fed up of his former existence. Every night, at midnight, these generators are switched off, plunging the island into smothering darkness.

Was this the sort of lifestyle change Roger anticipated? “I suppose the darkness becomes part of our lives” says Roger, “it expands before us like an abyss. When you’re lying in bed listening to the wind and the lights have gone off, you realise what being alone really is.” Roger’s wife Patrizia explains: “it feels really cut off, a sort of certain feeling of despair. After you’ve gone through that you are a different person.”

‘Stargazer’ must surely be one of the most romantic job titles out there. Yet when Jarvis meets astronomer Jay, it isn’t stars he’s looking out for in the night’s sky; it’s ‘near earth objects’.

“Even though it’s very rare,” says Jay, director of The Spaceguard Centre in Wales, “if a large asteroid or comet comes along then the effects of that could be absolutely catastrophic, right up to causing mass extinctions.” Before you lose sleep tonight thinking of asteroid-caused extinctions, rest assured this isn’t as bleak a prospect as it sounds. Jay explains that it’s one of the few natural disasters that can be predicted and mitigated. His job involves tracking asteroids – if one passes half way between us and the Moon, it’s considered pretty close. One of the easiest ways to redirect an asteroid or comet is to give it a nudge in a different direction. This can happen accidentally, when they bump into one another, but we have the technology available to give an asteroid or comet the nudge it needs if we can’t leave it down to a chance collision.

For the next two decades, Jay thinks we’re safe from near earth objects. At least, those that he’s aware of…

Dungeness is hard to conceptualise if you’ve never been there. It’s a vast, shingle-strewn headland and the closest Britain’s got to a desert. Though sparsely populated, it is home to a nuclear power station, lighthouses and a diverse array of unusual wildlife that thrives in the hostile landscape. Of this wildlife, there are many hundreds of species of moth.

These nocturnal insects are trapped (humanely) and studied by Sean and David. The moths use the moon to navigate, but in doing so can also be drawn to artificial light which interferes with their navigational skills, sending them off course. Sean and David set up traps by the bird observatory. Each morning, they will meet there to compare the night time visitors which were drawn to the bright lights of the traps in the darkness. With the right temperature and wind conditions, moths can fly in from as far afield as the Mediterranean and North Africa. Sean explains that moths go far beyond those that eat your clothes or repeatedly headbutt your bathroom light of an evening. It was uncovering the huge diversity of the species that drew him to them like, well, a moth to a flame.

Tucked away in the Rif Mountains of Morocco is the remote village of Joujouka. It is only after nightfall that the Master Musicians of Joujouka start to play. Through the darkness, the mystical sound of their flutes and drums can be heard. In a cave over the hills, a villager will prepare himself for an historic ritual by dressing in shaggy hides as the mythical character Bou Jeloud, a goat-man not unlike Pan. The piercing opening notes echoing across the mountains act as his cue to come to the village. He dances around a fire, taunting villagers and members of the band with a handful of plants. The intense, cacophonous music can draw listeners into a trance-like state, and is thought to heal anguished minds. Take a listen and see if it works for you.

Driving tube trains is said to be a very lonely job. Thankfully Kylie, a night tube driver, is someone who loves her own company.

On weekend nights between midnight and five o’clock in the morning, she can be found travelling the length of the Victoria line, deep underneath the streets of London, singing to herself the whole way. She finds the solitude of the driver’s seat is the perfect environment to belt out Beyonce songs without being overheard. When she started, the prospect of being responsible for hundreds of passengers was nerve-wracking. Now, however, she likes the responsibility and knowing she can transport them safely from A to B. But her role goes beyond driving. If the tube train needs returning to the depot, it’s Kylie’s job to make sure there are no sleeping passengers left in the carriages. A gentle shake to awaken them is out of the question, so she is limited to making noise around them until they stir, get up, and leave. Please mind the gap.

During the comfort of daytime, when all is as it seems and the shadows feel softer and less ominous, it’s easy to discount the existence of ghosts. But then night falls, shadows lengthen and shapes become darker and more ambiguous. Are our eyes playing tricks on us, or is there really something lurking there?

If there is, you’ll want to be in the safe hands of Kathleen, part of the Mostly Ghostly Paranormal Investigations Bureau in Dumfries. Of an evening, Kathleen parks up adjacent to the Kinmount Straight, Scotland’s most haunted road, to investigate ghostly sightings. Her new friend Donna, a firm sceptic of the paranormal, recounts an experience she still can’t explain.

One night, driving up this particular stretch of road with her children, the car’s headlights caught on an overhead branch with something draped over it. On coming closer, she realised it was a body with its arms and legs slumped either side of the branch. As the car approached the figure’s head lifted, its face stretched into a jagged smile and its eyes locked with hers. Donna’s never found out who or what it was. Kathleen has heard multiple claims of phantom hitchhikers who accept lifts and then vanish from the passenger seat moments later. The pair explain that, historically, the area has seen considerable bloodshed. Such prolonged periods of bloody conflict in one place, they suppose, must leave some kind of emotional trace – an echo of its dark past...