Ghosts, the most franchised British sitcom since The Office, has a spirited afterlife that means that the comedy – like the immortally trapped inhabitants of Button House – can never truly die. Five international versions, broadcasting from America to Australia via Greece, can’t be wrong.
Even so: having perfectly wrapped a five-series run with a final, 2023 outing for their annual Christmas special, the creators and stars of the original BBC series knew that, if their creations were to live again on the big screen, they’d have to come up with something spectacular. Or, yes, spooktacular.
“The survivability of a sitcom depends on its repeatable format,” says Ben Willbond. One of the six-strong group of London-based actors/writers – informally known as the Horrible Histories Gang – who created Ghosts, he plays closeted military officer The Captain. “So, sure, all your characters will learn a little something in an episode. But by the end they’re going to be exactly as they were in the beginning of the episode.”
Try and break that format and you’re into the danger zone. “It’s where that lovely phrase ‘jumping the shark’ comes from,” says Willbond, referring to the infamous, paradigm-creating 1977 episode of Happy Days where the Fonz tried to do exactly that. “If you do something extraordinary and your characters are suddenly outside that safe zone, the mystery is gone. You can’t then come back to the safety of the sitcom.”
In Ghosts: The Possession of Button House, the troupe have, brilliantly, found a way to break free of the restriction of their 30-minute show while simultaneously honouring what made it a runaway, cross-generational hit almost as soon as it launched in 2019. After the series ended, Laurence Rickard, who plays caveman Robin and headless Tudor nobleman Humphrey, recalls the team being corralled in a room by one of their producers and “within 20 minutes-ish, hitting on a central idea that you could only do as a film: possession”.
In the 97-minute feature, the ghosts discover that they can inhabit the bodies of living people – in this case, a bunch of kids who break in to have a seance. With Button House as they know it under mortal threat, their ability to take over a teenager’s body kickstarts a supernatural version of the big-screen transfers of Kevin and Perry Go Large and The Inbetweeners movies. In this fast-paced mix of pathos, ghoulish gags and comedy caper, they’re not losing the plot on holiday in Ibiza or Malia, but they are going on a Home Counties mission to reconnect with Alison (Charlotte Ritchie) and Mike (Kiell Smith-Bynoe) – the living friends who salved the ghosts’ centuries-deep loneliness and boredom.
“That let us put proper stakes into it,” says Rickard of an escapade in which Simon Farnaby’s roguish, early-90s Tory MP Julian ventures into the outside world in the body of a 15-year-old (played by I Swear breakout Scott Ellis Watson) and risks losing more than his trousers. “With the series, they don’t need money and they’re already dead, so any jeopardy had come from what was happening to Mike and Alison. So finding a way to have genuine jeopardy for the ghosts [was key].” As was, Rickard adds, “the possibility of achieving the thing which they could never do in the show, which was leaving the grounds”.
Equally, this team of cine-literate writers could lean into all sorts of audience-pleasing tropes. “The fact that Ghosts has baked into it this element of the supernatural lent itself to being a film,” says Mathew Baynton (lovelorn Romantic poet Thomas). “The idea of the teenage gang felt like The Goonies. The body swap is Big or Freaky Friday. Their health being linked to being outside felt a bit E.T. The idea of Julian potentially fading away was Back to the Future. There’s an awful lot of nostalgic cinema love from us that poured its way in.”
The fizzy action – see: a car chase with Jim Howick’s 80s scoutmaster Pat blasting Status Quo in a stolen police car – mirrors the writing and filming process. With the cast involved in various other projects, the six-way script was pulled together via multiple writing rooms of varying configurations, and over Zooms from European hotel rooms.
But as Howick says, he, Baynton, Farnaby, Martha Howe-Douglas, Rickard and Willbond have a deep kinship formed during the (c)rush of Horrible Histories between 2009 and 2014. “We were doing a kids show which a few of us [initially] weren’t sure if we wanted to do. But the pace was insane: 12 episodes in the space you would make six, rushing to get costumes, rushing to get our beards on. It was a furious effort, and that has bonded us and given us a trust.”
Filming over six intense weeks this spring, that trust paid dividends, not least for Lolly Adefope (Kitty, the fluffy Regency aristo and late-blooming Whigfield fan), a non-writing member of the team who wasn’t in Horrible Histories.
“Ghosts always felt like a crossover with live comedy,” says the actor, who’s currently knocking them dead in theatrical sensation Oh, Mary! In London’s West End. “You’re going for the energy, rather than doing 1,000 takes to get the perfect delivery. If it makes the crew laugh, you’re like: great.”
“Definitely it was manic,” adds Howe-Douglas (snooty Lady Fanny). “It was very ambitious, budget-wise, for what we wanted to do. We’re proud of what we’ve achieved and [while] we might romanticise it now, looking back, it was really tough. It was long hours and lots of night shoots.
“Night shoots and children, which don’t normally go together,” adds Adefope with a smile. Plus, both Adefope and Howe-Douglas had to strap back into their corseted costumes. “It wasn’t the most comfortable green-room experience because you’re just full of skirts,” says Howe-Douglas, who also has to, as she puts it, “assume” the chins of the disapproving Lady Fanny.
“That was real physical discomfort on the back of my neck the first two days, because I hadn’t done it for three years. Because,” she clarifies, “I don’t do it in my spare time.”
While that continuity of character was obviously key, there was also a recalibration of those characters. “Alison and Mike are the centre of the universe in the TV show,” notes Baynton, “and usually the stakes of any given plots were about them and their ownership of the house. But in the film, they’re the cavalry. It’s all about: can Julian get to Alison and Mike get their help?”
The co-writer admits that he was “slightly worried” about presenting Ritchie and Smith-Bynoe with scripts in which their characters featured less. “It speaks to their good grace and humility that there was never a sense of [an issue] from them.”
For her part, Ritchie was more than happy with her narrative lot. “Although, screentime-wise, Alison and Mike are less involved, they do play such a crucial part,” she says. “Their journey together and that responsibility towards the ghosts is still at the heart of the story – that sense of family, what it is to belong and how you look after each other.”
That also speaks to that exquisite pathos that makes Ghosts haunting in every sense.
“That’s the beauty of this show,” agrees Ritchie, “the reality of the ghosts’ situation and how awful it is. There’s this depth that also creates relief and joy when they are so ridiculous and so funny.” But, she adds, that “serious topic” is ever-present. “The fact that they’re trapped there is so unbelievably hellish. It’s literally the definition of purgatory, which so many of us were brought up to fear.”
It also helps explain the universality of Ghosts, and its international adaptability. As Ritchie sees it, its “existential” heart is “something that every single person on the planet has in common: we all die”. In America, certainly, they can’t get enough of that, with the US Ghosts about to launch its sixth season, each numbering up to 22 episodes.
That, in turn, means they’re whizzing through plot lines. Farnaby tells me that he and Howick have just attended an NFL game in London with their US counterparts, Asher Grodman and Richie Moriarty. “Asher was asking us about the film, and I went, ‘Oh, it’s great because we have this big new idea which we haven’t done before, which is possession.’ And he went, ‘Oh, yeah, we’ve done that loads of times. We usually do it every Christmas.’”
Which, like Ghosts, is frightening, but also hilarious.
‘Ghosts: The Possession of Button House‘ is in cinemas now