Danny Robins talks about taking the comedy concept 'Live Ghost Hunt' from the stage, to the internet, and back again...

Plenty of jokes start life on Twitter and then make it on to stage, but what about a whole show going from the Internet into a theatre? Do jokes that work for an online audience work for a live one? This was the conundrum facing us when we decided to stage our show Live Ghost Hunt at Waterloo East Theatre this month.

Of course, I'm cheating slightly. Live Ghost Hunt started life as a stage show many years back at the Edinburgh Fringe. I wrote it and performed it with the very talented Dan Tetsell (the voice of Marion the cat on BBC Three's Mongrels). It featured Dan as parapsychologist Edwin Griffiths (sporting a very fine Welsh accent) and me as psychic medium Maurice Smythe (sporting an even finer blonde wig and 'tache combo). The concept, inspired by us watching TV ghost shows like Most Haunted and going on actual ghost-hunting trips, involved us creating a supernatural experience for the audience as we 'investigated' the theatre; in this first case, the Pleasance in Edinburgh. It was funny and, yes, just a little bit scary...

Live Ghost Hunt did well at the Fringe - The Guardian said we were 'superb' which was rather nice of them - and we always meant to do something more with it, but Dan and I got sucked into writing a BBC One sitcom after that, and then other work, and somehow the years went by and the ghostly props stayed in their box. We knew though that Live Ghost Hunt had been a special thing for both of us, something we'd been proud of and would one day return to. Then, recently, for some unknown reason, we started receiving a lot of emails and tweets from people who'd seen the original show, asking if we would do it again. It got us thinking, and when the opportunity came to team up again and do Live Ghost Hunt as a 'webcast' for Halloween last year, we both leapt at the chance.

The first job was to decide exactly what a 'webcast' was. We weren't going to do a straightforward podcast; we were aiming for something a little more ambitious. We'd become interested in the audio blogging site SoundCloud, where you could very easily upload chunks of audio in a way that meant people could click on them and listen straight away without needing to download anything. We had the idea that we wanted to create a listening experience that would spread across the whole of Halloween night; we'd upload instalments throughout the evening, as if they were episodes of one of those old serials that always finished with a cliff-hanger ending.

So, we re-imagined Live Ghost Hunt, transporting it from a sweaty unventilated Edinburgh theatre to a haunted house in Sussex. The characters would be in the house, conducting a 'vigil', as ghosthunters call it, and each audio instalment would be a report that they had uploaded. We'd start at 8pm and finish at midnight and things would happen along the way... strange things... as we attempted to 'explic the inexplicable'. We hoped people would stick with us throughout the night, coming back to their computer for each part, inbetween things like meals, cups of tea and precautionary exorcisms. We also hoped they might be getting a bit creeped out as they sat in their darkened rooms - the only light the glowing of their computer screens. I'm not saying we were going to be HG Wells's War of the Worlds, but well, maybe people would check behind their curtains.

As well as the audio we decided to employ the use of the comedian's friend, Twitter. It's such a good way to instantly communicate with a large group of people and we'd already decided that as much as possible we wanted our webcast to be able to interact with its listeners. So, when we created www.live-ghost-hunt.com we made it so that the audio and Twitter sat alongside each other - while they were listening, people could also read tweeted messages from Edwin, Maurice and their moody Gothic assistant Miriam, and the LGH team would upload pictures from their investigation. So, if we were talking about the ghost of 19th century innkeeper Silas Greenback, you could see a picture of him too. Helping us do all this techno stuff was web boffin Rob Sedgebeer, a man responsible for more comedians' websites than you could shake a computer mouse at. Recording all the audio, we had Ben Walker, a radio comedy producer who has recently been responsible for some excellent podcasts, such as Richard Herring's As It Occurs To Me, Danielle Ward's Do The Right Thing and Pappy's Flatshare Slamdown.

It all worked a treat on Halloween night. The interactive mix of Twitter and audio seemed to really appeal to people and by midnight we'd accumulated a fairly large following who'd laughed and been spooked in equal measure. In fact, it had been so much fun to do that, even though we'd only envisaged doing it as web one-off, it was no-brainer for us to want to do it again, but on stage this time. So, we were faced with the challenge of performing a show that had been painstakingly converted into an interactive web experience back in a theatre again...

We didn't want to just revert to what the show had been at the Fringe all those years ago. We'd learnt a hell of a lot doing the webcast, we felt the show had got a lot funnier (and indeed scarier!) with the extra material and we wanted to try and keep the feeling of the experience we created online for the new live show. The trouble was though, going through the script, we realised that a lot of the creepy atmospherics had been tailored to work for somebody sitting alone in their room - things you really had to listen to up close. Not all of these things would work with a room full of people. And also, there were lots of nice webby slightly geeky jokes we'd come up with that would appeal to the computer literate and 'Twitterati' but that we felt might be a bit 'in' for the theatre.

Those were the downsides. The massive upside was that an hour long Fringe show had developed into a longer show capable of providing a whole evening's entertainment at the theatre and with not only lots of nice new jokes but also some new scares. The webcast experience had been hugely useful. A web audience gives you a very immediate response. Having the Twitter feed along the audio, we knew exactly what our audience were thinking at each moment - when they were laughing, which bits scared them, and we could take all that on board and learn from it when re-writing and rehearsing for the stage. Everyone who listened on Halloween night played a part in creating the experience (NB not in an legal sense for any copyright lawyer out there!).

I'm hoping some of our webcast listeners will come down to watch the live show. Whilst some of the material is the same, a lot has changed, and I think the two are very different experiences - but experiences that have fed off each other - like a ghost eating someone's brains.