“I could read that all day!” says Ghosts co-creator Jim Howick with a smile. It’s mid-December, two weeks before the BBC comedy’s finale is due to air on Christmas Day, and Howick has just pulled up his and Mat Baynton’s episode script to check a detail while we talk on Zoom. Would he read a few lines out?
“The car drives away. The waving ghosts recede into the distance. Fade to black. The music stops. Is that the end? No. We fade back in on the driveway, and the music starts again, but the house looks different. It’s all beautifully restored and decorated, tastefully, for Christmas.
“An older couple step into the frame in the foreground, their backs to camera. Looking up at the house, she holds the handle of the wheelie case, and he has a golf bag on his shoulder.
“There you go,” says Howick. “That’s that bit. I could read that all day.”
That bit is Ghosts’ final scene, a flash-forward some decades into the future, in which a much older Alison and Mike return to Button House – now a luxury golf hotel – for what we learn is their regular Christmas visit. The receptionist greets them. Alison walks up the staircase and into the Higham Suite – named for Kitty’s family who lived there before the Buttons.
Behind the closed door, we hear Alison wish the ghosts a Merry Christmas and respond to voices only she can hear: “Of course we can, Kitty. Thank you, Thomas. You flatter me. What’s new, Julian?”
Should fans draw any conclusions about the absence of Robin, Lady B, the Captain and Humphrey in that roll call? The others haven’t been – to use Ghosts speak – ‘sucked off’ in the interim? No, confirms Howick.
“She reacts to the characters you would expect her to react to straight away. So it’s Thomas and Kitty, isn’t it? It wasn’t that we wanted to throw any sort of mystery into it at all, it was just that we couldn’t have her go: ‘Oh, hello you! Hello you! Hello you! Hello you!’ in order because it would have been rubbish.
“We had to pick what would be the most realistic greeting and who would be champing at the bit to greet her like puppies at the door and it would be them. They can draw conclusions, but it is our belief, as far as we’re concerned, that no one else has been sucked off.”
Seeing the once dilapidated Button House restored to its former beauty in the show’s final moments is a heart-warming end for the show. There are no futuristic touches (“Hoverboards and robots are when it gets expensive!” jokes Howick) but look closely at the hotel décor and you’ll see that homage has been paid to its most famous residents. The stuffed fox is proudly on display, as are restored portraits of Lady Button – with her beloved dog Dante – and Humphrey Bone hanging by the staircase. During filming, the sight moved Howick almost to tears.
“Walking up that staircase with the portraits on the wall of Lady B and of Humphrey, that really got me going. I just felt, here are these sort of lost souls that only Alison knows about, being publicly displayed in all their splendour, and I felt so pleased for them. That really got me quite emotional.”
It was an emotional filming experience all round. Martha Howe-Douglas recounted at the series launch that she was so moved by saying goodbye to Button House that she “cried herself young” and needed her old lady make-up reapplied. Similar make-up techniques were used to age up actors Charlotte Ritchie and Kiell Smith-Bynoe for the finale flash-forward, not that we’re shown much of it in the final edit.
“We talked very early on about having actually age-appropriate actors for those parts, but we didn’t want to remove their natural gaits and physicality from those moments. We wanted to know it was them and so we felt like the best way to do that would be to age them classily without prosthetics, and be very, very delicate with what we see.
“Natalie Pateman and her make-up department did an amazing job and [director] Simon Hynd did a great job shooting that. I know that we got some takes and rushes of the scene at the the desk where we sort of do get a glimpse of them more clearly in the mirror, but he felt it was more important to see the bustle of the hotel. And I agree.”
