Exploring stories after dark with Dan Richards

May 19, 2025·31 min·2 clips

Robert Bound explores the hidden world of night workers, from dockers to ferry crews, with author Dan Richards.

The night is not just sleep. Robert Bound starts with darkness, dancing, insomnia and alarm clocks, then shifts toward the work that carries on while most of us are absent. Dan Richards follows those hours in Overnight, a book built from journeys, conversations and stories after dark, including jobs that feel essential and jobs that simply need doing. The mood is curious and warm. Bound moves through making, delivering, packing, driving, nursing, rescuing and bats feeding on moths. Technology keeps nudging its way in. Richards lingers on endurance racing, where hypercars worth about 2.8 million euros run on residue from wine production. It sounds flashy, but he treats it as more than spectacle. The race shows how strange night-time systems can still brush up against ordinary life through hybrid technology and fuel. Connection holds the episode together. Richards knows the night can bring fear and isolation, but the book keeps finding people and processes linked together in the dark. Bound handles automation with care. Workers at Southampton docks, in search and rescue, and on ferries become human links inside chains that are getting more automated. That human presence is the point. After dark, the conversation suggests, judgment and care still need people. A bakery brings it down to earth. The Dusty Knuckle Bakery in Dalston appears as one example of night labour. The episode also leaves room for a dry aside about being told he snores, which keeps things from getting too solemn. Bound closes by calling Overnight charming, fascinating and rightly personal, while naming its full title and Canongate publication.

As heard by us

A thoughtful look at the people and systems that keep the night moving.

Dan Richards' Overnight treats the night as a working landscape, moving from dockers and other night workers to care, medical, and rescue jobs, and to the human links that still run through automated chains.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

A nocturnal tour of the people and jobs that keep the night running.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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