Lovely ghosts

TV Se­ries

Far from being scary, the ghosts in this se­ries on Mo­vis­tar offer view­ers truly hi­lar­i­ous mo­ments, es­pe­cially if they are fans of the ab­sur­dity and fine irony that is so char­ac­ter­is­tic of Eng­lish hu­mour. The se­ries pre­miered on BBC Com­edy in 2019 and after four sea­sons, the fifth and final sea­son has been an­nounced for this year. Its suc­cess in Great Britain, where it at­tracted over four mil­lion view­ers every week, has spawned an Amer­i­can re­make, which can be seen here on the TNT chan­nel. But, as is usu­ally the case, noth­ing beats the orig­i­nal.

The story takes us to the But­ton man­sion, a coun­try house with a lot of his­tory lo­cated in an imag­i­nary rural area in the south of Eng­land. The pro­tag­o­nists are the young cou­ple Al­i­son and Mike, who are look­ing for a cheap apart­ment to rent to­gether when she sud­denly in­her­its a huge coun­try man­sion, which had be­longed to a dis­tant rel­a­tive. Al­though the cou­ple re­ceives the news with en­thu­si­asm, they clash head-on with re­al­ity when they see the crum­bling state of the house, which re­quires a fi­nan­cial in­vest­ment they can­not af­ford.

Also, what they don’t know at the out­set is that it is also haunted by a cu­ri­ous cast of squab­bling ghosts from across the ages who all died on the grounds. The ghosts are friendly enough, but they don’t want the new­com­ers to dis­turb their tran­quil­ity, and so they con­spire to get rid of them. They don’t have much luck at first but even­tu­ally man­age to get Al­i­son to fall through an open win­dow. She gets con­cus­sion and after spend­ing two weeks in a coma she dis­cov­ers that her near-death ex­pe­ri­ence now al­lows her to see, hear and in­ter­act with the ghosts. With this abil­ity, liv­ing in a man­sion haunted by nine ghosts that all have their own quirks doesn’t seem like the best idea. But after con­vinc­ing her­self that she hasn’t gone crazy, Al­i­son de­cides she’ll have to deal with the ghosts, while Mike, who can’t see them, seems to com­pete with them .

Among the de­ceased char­ac­ters is a Tory MP who died in a sex­ual scan­dal in 1993, a melo­dra­matic poet frus­trated by ro­man­ti­cism, who im­me­di­ately falls in love with Al­i­son and does not hes­i­tate to ex­pose his love to her con­tin­u­ously, an aris­to­cratic woman who wants to be­come her best friend, the me­dieval maid burnt as a witch who spies on Mike when he goes to the toi­let, Lady Fanny, an Ed­war­dian aris­to­crat who re-en­acts her mur­der every night, the Cap­tain, a World War II sol­dier, Pat, an en­dear­ing camp mon­i­tor from the 1970s who died in a ridicu­lous ac­ci­dent, Sir Humphrey, a be­headed Tudor no­ble­man, and fi­nally, the old­est ghost, Robin, a cave­man with a pas­sion for chess. In short, they all form a hi­lar­i­ous com­mu­nity that has cap­ti­vated both adult and young au­di­ences, no doubt be­cause it con­veys the drive and en­thu­si­asm of its cre­ators, who hap­pen to be most of the ac­tors who play the ghosts in the tele­vi­sion se­ries.