‘We’ll keep doing this if people pay us!’ The cast of TV hit Ghosts on making a movie – and maybe a caveman spinoff

When the final episode of Ghosts was aired in December 2023, the sitcom felt as if it had reached a definitive conclusion. The show’s central relationships, between Charlotte Ritchie’s Alison and the ghosts who haunt her tumbledown inherited manor house, were neatly tied up, as they encouraged her to sell the place to a hotel developer. It was a tearjerker of an episode for the millions of people who watched it, as well as for the cast and crew behind the scenes.

“We had stopped the series with genuinely no intention of coming back,” explains the show’s co-creator Mathew Baynton, who also stars as the callow romantic poet Thomas. “We were all in tears on the last day of filming,” he says, now perched on the uncomfortable end of a chaise lounge in a London hotel suite.

“I was so upset that it finished,” adds Lolly Adefope, who plays the excitable Kitty, from the better structured end of the chaise. “It was like being at a party and you guys were leaving.”

“It was a clear ending, and the guys felt like they had fully explored all of the characters,” says director Simon Hynd, “but I did notice a look of regret in some of their eyes.”

All of which is to say that Ghosts is now back. Although the television series remains over, the story will continue in the new film Ghosts: The Possession of Button House. So the question is, who blinked first?

“Alison Carpenter, our executive at Monumental, had started to say, ‘We could get the funding for a film if you guys want to do that,’” explains Baynton. “But we just batted it away.”

“The fear was that you’d end up making a 90-minute episode of a TV show, and it would feel like, Please Sir! The Movie,” says co-creator and star Laurence Rickard, who plays both caveman Robin and decapitated nobleman Sir Humphrey Bone. “Which I love, by the way.”

Eventually Carpenter convinced the show’s six creators and stars (the others being Simon Farnaby, Martha Howe-Douglas, Jim Howick and Ben Willbond, not present) to at least get into a room and discuss the prospect. “We all talked through what we didn’t want it to be, and what it sort of had to be to be a film,” explains Baynton. “That led us very quickly to the concept of possession, which would allow one of the ghosts to get out of the grounds.”

“It was the fastest turnaround ever,” laughs Rickard. “We went in at 9:30am going ‘I mean, it’s nice to see everyone, but I think the answer is probably no’ – and then by 11 o’clock, we were going, ‘We have to do this.’”

The resulting film is still very much Ghosts, with its unique mix of sharp absurdity (at one point a Ouija board spells out ‘Leave’ to make a point about Brexit) and near-debilitating emotional notes (you may never again look at a scotch egg without crying). But it is undoubtedly a movie, with stakes and a ticking clock and big set pieces.

“The possession idea immediately invites a body swap sort of thing, which reminded us of Big,” says Baynton. “Then we were talking about, what if the possession doesn’t last and his spirit is fading, which reminded us of Back to the Future. The group of kids breaking into the house felt like The Goonies. All our touchstones for this were films we loved in our youth.”

The film is an astonishing feat, not just because of its quick turnaround – Hynd only learned of the film late last year – but because every member of its ensemble has a vital part to play in the plot.

“With the series, we got so used to writing multi-thread narratives,” explains Baynton. “In any episode, the actual stories are told in two or three brief moments, so that had become our mode of writing anyway.”

This approach meant that, despite no longer living in Button House, Alison and her husband Mike, played by Kiell Smith-Bynoe, find themselves swept up in the action. Smith-Bynoe seems especially pleased with his arc. “Mike gets to prove himself in this one,” he explains, “which felt good after spending a few years not getting to do that.”

Smith-Bynoe has arguably always had the hardest acting job on Ghosts, as Mike is often the only person on screen who isn’t a ghost and can’t interact with them. This challenge was doubled for the film’s climax when, without giving too much away, a roomful of characters old and new flit in and out of tangibility. “It took me a minute,” he says. “I had to keep asking Simon who I was supposed to be able to see.”

Much of the cast this time around are new, in the form of the aforementioned kids. It takes a lot to steal a film out from underneath a cast as talented as this, but Scott Ellis Watson, who played the young John Davidson in I Swear, is phenomenal here, largely because he spends a lot of time doing a bang-on impersonation of a dead middle-aged Tory MP.

The new additions were something that Adefope in particular appreciated. “It was so fun having Scott around,” she says. “I was sort of the Gen Z member of the cast, so we talked a lot about memes and TikTok.”

“You were the child whisperer, weren’t you?” says Rickard.

“Yes, exactly. I was translating for you,” she smiles back.

With the show, the six creators were able to break off and write individual episodes in various permutations of their troupe. But the film is credited to all six of them. Was that a hard thing to accomplish? “It was just a process of who was around at what time,” says Baynton. “So sometimes it was two of us, sometimes three or four. What is lovely about that is that the person who’s absent for a little period of time then becomes your fresh pair of eyes when they return. You get to a point at times where all you can see is A or B and both of them are problematic, but then someone who’s been away for a couple of weeks comes in and goes, ‘Well, what about C?’ And you go, ‘Oh yeah!’”

A lot of this is simply muscle memory. The Ghosts team are now veterans, having met while making the Horrible Histories TV show almost two decades ago, and continued with the sitcom Yonderland and the 2015 Shakespeare comedy film Bill. It’s hard to think of any writing and performing group this large who have managed to stay intact for so long. Even Monty Python ran out of films and shows in less time, their work together now largely consisting of tweeting hatred at each other.

“Oh, we’ve got that phase to look forward to,” laughs Rickard. “I’ve been drafting some of that stuff.”

Rickard is the one who seems to have most keenly felt the absence of Ghosts: “The first year after the series stopped was the first time that we hadn’t done something together in 18 years.” You get the sense that this film exists in part because its creators missed hanging out with each other.

So why stop the party now? Will there be anything else to look forward to from the gang? “There isn’t something secretly being developed,” insists Baynton. “But we’ve always had the same feeling, which is that we love working together and we’ll keep doing it if people will pay us to do it.”

Does that mean more Ghosts films? That prompts a slightly more uneasy response. “This does sort of feel like, you know, the big swan song,” replies Rickard.

“Yes, but we said that before, so no one can take our word for it,” adds Baynton. “But there’s no intention. Also, ghosts can’t age, and I’m rapidly getting way too old to play Thomas.”

“But Robin could definitely have a spinoff, and that wouldn’t be a problem,” cracks Rickard, noting that he’s looking more and more like a long-dead caveman with every passing year. “It would be great. My makeup call would get shaved right down.”