Ghosts (BBC 2019)

In every generation there must be a silly TV series about the supernatural which does not aspire to be anything other than entertaining. Or at least there ought to be one. Ghosts, which is available on the BBC iPlayer here, is a good example of a comedy that plays with familiar haunted house tropes and pretty much gets it right. It's not scary (because it's a comedy) but it is enjoyable if you put your brain in neutral and simply watch what happens. If you've seen Horrible Histories, it's the same kind of thing only with a slightly more adult slant, hence it's relatively late time slot.

The premise is the time-honoured gimmick whereby a very, very distant relative of a deceased toff inherits a big country house. Alison (Charlotte Ritchie) is the inheritor of the crumbling Button Hall. She and her boyfriend Mike (Kiell Smyth-Bynoe) plan to renovate the hall and turn it into a posh hotel. But Alison has a near-death experience that leaves her able to see ghosts - and the house is full of them.





The ghosts, as you can see from the above, range from a recently-deceased (and significantly trouserless) MP to a caveman who died long before Button Hall was built. There are also more ghosts in the cellar, which turns out to be a medieval plague pit. A nice touch is the fact that the ghosts can - with tremendous effort - move objects, but only feebly and unreliably. This means their capacity to haunt the young couple is limited, but they do their best.

This is very much an ensemble comedy that might have begun as an Edinburgh Fringe show. There's a lot of fun to be had with the various ways the ghosts died (the Scoutmaster with the arrow through his neck a particularly good case) and their attempts to adjust to modern life, as when the general discovered all the stuff on the telly about Nazis and World War 2.

Ghosts is a jokey, lightweight show that, for me, provided some easy watching in between more serious fare. It's well-made, often witty, and is developing its own distinctive charm. A second series/season is apparently under development.