‘It was like being at a party’ … Mathew Baynton, Martha Howe-Douglas, Jim Howick and Ben Willbond in Ghosts: The Possession of Button House. Photograph: Mandozzi Photography/PA View image in fullscreen ‘It was like being at a party’ … Mathew Baynton, Martha Howe-Douglas, Jim Howick and Ben Willbond in Ghosts: The Possession of Button House. Photograph: Mandozzi Photography/PA Comedy films ‘We’ll keep doing this if people pay us!’ The cast of TV hit Ghosts on making a movie – and maybe a caveman spinoff As the haunters of Button House hit the big screen with a plot about an escaped phantom, we hear how the team just missed each other too much – and why grunting Robin may get his own show
Stuart Heritage Tue 20 Oct 2026 16.14 CEST Last modified on Tue 20 Oct 2026 17.19 CEST Share Prefer the Guardian on Google W hen 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.”
When Ghosts ended, it was the first time that we hadn’t done something together in 18 years “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 po…