Exclusive: Ghosts star wanted Humphrey to be his "main ghost" instead of Robin

Ghosts has been one of the biggest comedy hits of the last decade, and it's made the transition to the big screen with the film The Possession of Button House which is finally out in cinemas now.

A huge part of the appeal is the main group of lead ghosts, mostly made up of the Horrible Histories and Yonderland team, who all perfectly complement each other.

But when the show was being developed, one of the stars/creators was really pushing for a different character to be part of the main gang.

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Speaking exclusively to Digital Spy, Mathew Baynton revealed: "I will say, in the early days of the series, when we were first conceiving of the show, Larry [Laurence Rickard] was like, 'I think Humphrey is my main [ghost]'.

"And we were all going, 'Larry... Robin is going to be so good. People are going to love this character'."

"My pitch was, my main character would be Humphrey, and he always had his head on, apart from the odd gag where it fell off," Rickard himself added.

"And then once in a while, we'll see the little caveman character who will be the odd joke. Cut to five years later…"

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While the team definitely made the right call with Rickard's characters, they made quite a costly mistake during the initial production of the film, one they didn't even realise until new cast member — and Ghosts superfan — Sian Clifford pointed out.

"Sian is such a fan that she spotted an enormous mistake, a continuity mistake, that we'd made between the series and the film. Because the house keeps a lot of our props because they do tours there, the bear is always there on the stairs," he explained.

"I think we'd seen it so many times we'd forgotten that at the end of the series, the bear gets destroyed, so it stayed on the stairs and we shot some scenes.

"And then Sian came in to do some of her stuff and was like, 'Why is the bear there?'. So genuinely, a whole portion of our special effects budget was blown on just removing a bear from some wide shots."

Ghosts: The Possession of Button House is out now in UK cinemas.

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Joe Anderton is a freelance news writer at Digital Spy, having worked there since 2016. In his time, he's covered a host of live events and interviewed celebrities big and small. A big fan of TV and movies both mainstream and obscure, Joe also enjoys video games and in particular PlayStation. Joe currently does not use Twitter, but he only ever used it to tell people to watch the film Help! I'm a Fish.

Movies Editor, Digital Spy  Ian has more than 10 years of movies journalism experience as a writer and editor.  Starting out as an intern at trade bible Screen International, he was promoted to report and analyse UK box-office results, as well as carving his own niche with horror movies, attending genre festivals around the world.   After moving to Digital Spy, initially as a TV writer, he was nominated for New Digital Talent of the Year at the PPA Digital Awards. He became Movies Editor in 2019, in which role he has interviewed 100s of stars, including Chris Hemsworth, Florence Pugh, Keanu Reeves, Idris Elba and Olivia Colman, become a human encyclopedia for Marvel and appeared as an expert guest on BBC News and on-stage at MCM Comic-Con. Where he can, he continues to push his horror agenda – whether his editor likes it or not.