Written by the Horrible Histories crew, this must-see supernatural comedy bears their stamp of absurdity – and is full of feelgood spirit
There was a heartbreaking moment in Ghosts when Mary (Katy Wix), who was burned as a witch in the 17th century, listened to a bowl of Rice Krispies. The snap, crackle and pop, she told Alison (who after a near-death experience can see and hear the ghosts who haunt Button Hall) was the sound of tiny people crying out for help. Then something worse happened. “They have stopped calling out! They are dead!” Mary wailed. It was like The Silence of the Lambs with Rice Krispies instead of lambs. Which understandably put Alison (Charlotte Ritchie) right off breakfast.
One thing that makes Ghosts so endearing is how the spirits find the modern world in which they’re doomed to live so absurd. I don’t know how your 2020 is going, but that resonates with my lived experience. When, for instance, Alison told them that a man landed on the moon, the ghosts who died before 1969 were sceptical. Regency poet Thomas sneered disbelievingly: “How did he get there? Climb up a beanstalk? You’re dicked in the nob.” That line had me creased up with laughter – though, it turned out, for all the wrong reasons. I imagined that Thomas had picked up some 21st-century slang from Mike or Alison, the modern-day herberts who have inherited Button Hall. In fact, “dicked in the nob” was Regency slang, defined in Grose’s 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue as silly or crazed.