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“We should find a day to beef up this Haunted Hotel idea, should we not?” So went the email Mathew Baynton sent to his Horrible Histories co-stars in June 2016, after they’d wrapped on the third and final season of their fantasy comedy Yonderland.
Six weeks later, the group gathered in a rented room in central London and spent two days working up the skeleton of a new sitcom pitch. “Haunted Hotel Idea” evolved into “Dead”, which eventually evolved into Ghosts, the beloved BBC comedy that ran for five series from 2019 to 2023, with a US remake now in its fourth season, and German, Australian – and reportedly Greek and Spanish – versions in development.
The original pitch for Ghosts differed greatly from the final product. Instead of nine core characters Pat, Thomas, Fanny, Julian, Kitty, Mary, The Captain, Robin and Humphrey, the ghosts were to have numbered in the hundreds. Each actor would have taken on multiple roles in a replay of their Horrible Histories dressing-up box sketch show approach. A 12-minute “taster” filmed to work out the tone and practical FX featured 40-plus ghosts, mostly all played by the creators, crowded into the ballroom of a stately home.
It was too many. The number and variety of characters undermined the show’s central theme of being inescapably trapped forever with the same small group, and the emotional resonance for which Ghosts became loved was harder to find. The character list was shrunk and the show was all the better for it, but fans never stopped wondering which of the gang’s creations had been cut.
Now, thanks to a new behind-the-scenes book published by Bloomsbury, we know. With cast and creator interviews, and the original notes for the budding sitcom idea, here are the characters who almost made their way into Ghosts.
The Hotel Porter and the Victorian Nanny
The notes taken by Mathew Baynton after two days’ spent beefing up the “haunted hotel idea” with his co-creators Jim Howick, Ben Willbond, Laurence Rickard, Simon Farnaby and Martha Howe-Douglas outline a version of the show in which its stately home had recently been converted into a hotel. In that early version, the ghosts attempt to haunt the living residents out but instead of causing an accident that allows somebody living to see and hear them, they accidentally commit an actual murder by scaring a hotel porter into falling down a lift shaft.
That porter/bellboy would then have joined the ghosts and fallen in love with the ghost of a Victorian nanny (“she looks after all the dead children” explain Baynton’s notes) who would have been “very proper and scandalised by almost anything anyone says”.
The Drunk Monk and the Pious Nun
A photo in Ghosts Brought to Life shows Ben Willbond in traditional monk’s robes playing chess with an early version of Robin the caveman. Said monk was to have lived in the house’s wine cellar where he was “perpetually sozzled on his brew”, having drunk himself to death on monastic fortified wine. Another note suggests that the monk was to have tried to keep to his vow of silence but would have been continually tested on it.
Alongside the drunk monk was an idea for a pious nun who eventually evolved into Lady Button, remembers Martha Howe-Douglas, who writes: “Looking back at the notes from this meeting, it appears that the first iteration of Lady Button was a nun who had spent her life in pious celibacy and, having not ended up at the pearly gates, was now loud and opinionated.”
A Druid, Nazi bombers, Unhappy Marrieds, a Chimney Sweep…
Other scrapped characters mentioned include a bearded druid, a chimney sweep, a pair of bickering Nazi airmen (who presumably evolved into bit-player Luftwaffe pilots Helmut and Wolfgang as featured in series one), a Joan of Arc character in chainmail, a six-year-old boy named Ancient William, a spooky Woman in Black who doesn’t speak but floats on the ceiling, “a pair of Roundheads playing football in the grounds with a severed head”, dysfunctional cooking staff in the kitchen, and “a peasant man and wife who hated each other the point where the husband had killed the wife, only then to die by accident and end up spending eternity in her company.”
Headless John & Thomas the Voyeur
The bones of the eventual characters were all mostly there from the start, though with slight tweaks: The Captain was listed as a World War One and not WWII army officer. The youth club leader who died in an archery accident was from the 1970s and not the 1980s. Humphrey was named “Headless John” and was killed for sleeping with the queen when the royal family came to visit. The peasant “witch” was drowned instead of burned at the stake. MP Julian was dressed in leather trousers with a gag in his mouth. And Thomas the Romantic poet evolved from “a spivvy, lothario character (in the mould of the Fast Show character, the 13th Duke of Wybourne) who in death had to settle for voyeurism.”
There’s much more where that came from in the book, including episode-by-episode lookbacks, behind-the-scenes trivia, memories from the show’s creators and directors, and early unused story ideas (including a Halloween special where other ghosts come to visit). Perhaps the international remakes could mine the newly published info for future ideas?
Ghosts Brought to Life: The Making of a Classic is published by Bloomsbury and out now.
The post A Drunk Monk, a Hotel Porter and a Victorian Nanny: Meet the Characters Cut From BBC Ghosts appeared first on Den of Geek.
