Thanks, I tell the creators of Ghosts sarcastically, for making my daughter cry. The evening before, my family watched the supernatural sitcom’s final episode, and the only dry eyes in the house were mine.
This reaction, I tell Martha Howe-Douglas, Laurence Rickard, Jim Howick and Mathew Baynton over Zoom call, is going to be replicated across Britain. Did you think about how you were going to ruin everybody’s Christmas when you wrote this tearjerker? “Ah, you can but dream,” says Baynton, who plays the Romantic poet Thomas, wistfully.
The Ghosts team implore me not to reveal plot twists from the last episode, but there are some tantalising details I can share without spoiling the viewing experience. First, this is the episode where the final secret about the ghosts is revealed, namely how the Captain died. Second, there is a flash-forward to Alison and Mike in their dotage. But most of all, this is where we learn the fates of everybody, living and dead. I’d like to reveal more about whether Alison and Mike do sell land from the estate to build a golf course, or if any ghost is going to emulate Katy Wix’s character Mary and be sucked off (their words) into the spirit realm, but if I did it’s quite possible the cast would hunt me down and chop off my head. Or maybe they’d just haunt me for ever which, to be honest, doesn’t sound so bad.
The show’s premise – that the ghosts can never leave the grounds of the house – is a tragicomic trope of Britcoms, ie that the protagonists can’t escape their fate. It was Harold’s psychic wound in Steptoe and Son, and now in Ghosts all the spirits are stuck in each others’ company for good as if Button House is a home counties Hotel California. Or if you prefer, the Horrible Histories team have made a funny Uncle Vanya.
Four talking heads nod on their respective Zoom screens.
“I always think Chekhov is funnier than it’s usually done,” says Rickard – who plays two parts, Humphrey the headless and Robin the caveman. “They’re fixed somewhere and also utterly baffled as to why they’re there. So you have these existential crises going on with people who are already dead.” “I was in a production of Vanya once,” says Howick, who plays Scout leader Pat. “It was nothing like this.”
Baynton says: “On the face of it, it’s about ghosts, but it’s really just a metaphor for what it’s like to be a person. You’re born into the world and everyone’s got different opinions about what everything means. To do that in a family sitcom always felt like an amazing trick to me. It kind of is Beckett, but it’s um ... silly Beckett.”
Cast your mind back to April 2019, when the team behind Horrible Histories unveiled a new comedy. Did your careers ever recover from Horrible Histories being endorsed by Michael Gove as a tool for teaching? “I think that was nicely ballasted by James Cleverly or Piers Morgan a few years later around Brexit saying that it was a waste of licence fee,” says Baynton. It was actually Morgan who, with his unerring grasp of the national mood, in 2020 tweeted that the show was “an outrageous, shameful abuse of public money”.
At the outset, Ghosts seemed like a spin-off from Horrible Histories’ Stupid Deaths segment, in which the team recreated a laughable demise (King Harold shot in the eye at Hastings, self-styled gong farmer Richard the Raker drowning in his own poo, Aeschylus killed by an eagle dropping a tortoise on his head). The eponymous Ghosts often died similarly stupidly: Howick’s Scout leader Pat died in an archery accident and wears an arrow through his neck for all eternity; Lolly Adefope’s Georgian noblewoman Kitty was slain by a spider bite from a transatlantically imported pineapple.
In episode one, thirtysomething herberts Alison and Mike move into an ancestral pile that she’s inherited, only to find that it’s haunted. After she falls through a window and cracks her head open, Alison can see the ghosts but Mike can’t – though if he could he would probably put out the lights of the dead Romantic poet who keeps putting the moves on his wife.
Ghosts has been a lovely antidote to our times. For the cast too, making it has been a joy. “We’re very different people,” says Rickard, “but the thing we’ve got in common is a sense of humour. And if you can have one thing in common, that is the best thing, because it’s a light, fun, nice thing you want to keep returning to.
“At the end of rehearsal day, my face hurts from laughing. It’s a really unusual feeling that you’re giving yourself a headache from having a good time, without being horribly drunk.”
A few days later, I interview Charlotte Ritchie and Kiell Smith-Bynoe, who play Alison and Mike. “I think it has real kindness at the heart of it,” says Ritchie. “The core of the show, I think, is that all these people you might label as different are navigating things together.”
That said, Ghosts also manages to tackle some pretty important social issues. The second world war army veteran Captain, whose love for a junior officer dare not speak its name, is fondly imagined. More significant yet is the representation of people of colour. Smith-Bynoe says he was especially delighted when last year’s Christmas special depicted something he’d never seen on TV before: a Black family having Christmas dinner. “I’ve had couples come up to me and, them being an interracial couple, say that it means a lot to them to see that at the forefront. It’s not talked about, just there.”
Ghosts has made the pair famous. “If I wear Alison’s jumpers when I go out, I get recognised,” says Ritchie. Or misrecognised: “I was out the other day and this woman came up to me and said: ‘Liked you in Fleabag.’ So I went with it.” “Why not?” laughs Smith-Bynoe. “I had a thing where somebody was convinced I did a warm-up for Mo Gilligan.” But you never have done? “Of course not! But it was hard to convince them I knew better.”
Both Ritchie and Smith-Bynoe would like to have a word with the writers. They’re not happy the show has come to an end. “I’ve got nothing in January,” she says. “Me neither.” They have a point. They are unemployed in a cost of living crisis while several of the writer-actors on the show have parlayed their fame into work on other lucrative franchises. Baynton can now be seen as Fickelgruber opposite Timothée Chalamet as the eponymous Wonka, while Simon Farnaby co-wrote Wonka, Paddington 2 and the forthcoming Paddington in Peru.
In theory, Ghosts need never end: spirits are eternal, so shouldn’t a sitcom about them be, too? Perhaps the Ghosts team should consider making a spin-off. What would be the Frasier to Ghosts’ Cheers, I ask. “Mick,” says Baynton. He means the ghost who shares the cellar of Button House with other plague victims, each one played by a member of the main cast. “It’d be called Mick with an exclamation mark. And it’d have a live audience. I’d come on and say: ‘Hello everyone! Hiya! I’m home!’ Like Happy Days. Don’t even bother with the makeup, the lights aren’t on.” It sounds terrible, to be fair.
Perhaps we have to accept that Ghosts is dead. Certainly, the cast have plundered the set for memorabilia. Ritchie has snaffled Alison’s jumpers, Smith-Bynoe took Mike’s monocle, Howe-Douglas has Lady Button’s rings and Ben Willbond has taken the Captain’s stick. Rickard proudly holds up Humphrey’s severed head to camera.
All that remains now are the repeats. “I think, more so than drama, people will go back to comedies they love and want to experience them again and find more in them,” says Baynton. “There are plenty of shows that are comfort. Sometimes you put them on so you can have a nap.” He seems to be suggesting that Ghosts is part of that soporific canon. I look at the four screens, each interviewee giggling happily at the thought of Britain not sobbing over the last episode, but dozing through repeats. It may be ending with a Christmas special, but Ghosts will be haunting us for many years to come.
Ghosts Christmas Special is on BBC One on Christmas Day at 7.45pm.
