Ghosts

Ghosts is the third project from the six writer-performers who met on the CBBC sketch show Horrible Histories: Mathew Baynton, Simon Farnaby, Martha Howe-Douglas, Jim Howick, Laurence Rickard and Ben Willbond. After Yonderland and the film Bill, they wrote a sitcom in which all six of them could play the dead. Made by Monumental Television with the troupe's own company, Them There, it ran on BBC One from April 2019 to Christmas Day 2023, five series of six episodes plus four Christmas specials.

Alison and Mike (Charlotte Ritchie and Kiell Smith-Bynoe) inherit Button House, a crumbling country pile they mean to turn into a hotel. After an accident Alison can see and hear its resident ghosts, a household gathered from across English history. Willbond plays a stiff wartime Captain, Baynton a lovelorn Regency poet, Farnaby a trouserless Tory MP, Howick a cheerful scout leader with an arrow through his neck, Howe-Douglas the Edwardian lady of the house and Rickard a caveman, with Lolly Adefope as a sunny Georgian noblewoman and Katy Wix as a woman burned as a witch. Their sketch-show training is plain in how evenly the jokes are spread: nobody in the ensemble is left to play straight for long.

In 2021 it was nominated for the BAFTA TV Award for Scripted Comedy and the BAFTA Craft Award for Comedy Writer. CBS adapted it for American audiences that autumn, and in 2026 the original cast returned for a feature, Ghosts: The Possession of Button House. The show is warm without going soft, and it is one of the few recent British sitcoms that children and grandparents can laugh at together.