The ghosts of Button House have to leave their home in order to save it.
The Ghosts TV series was known for keeping the gag quotient high, and I can assure aficionados of the sitcom that the movie outing is just as impressive. Delightfully daft but rather moving, the jokes come at you faster than a vampire trying to outrun a sunrise, a mug chucked at your head by a poltergeist across a suburban kitchen, or a freshly turned zombie spotting a bemused Cillian Murphy in a hospital gown.
Though I also did love the rather juvenile name the writers have given to the local MP (alive this time): Richard Move.
You don’t need to have watched Ghosts in its BBC sitcom incarnation before jumping into their big screen outing though. It’s not quite in the Downton Abbey movification league – where as I said in my review you could get by on memes alone as background knowledge – but the Ghosts movie exposition is speedy and to the point, the characters deftly drawn.
You’ll soon twig why dead Tory MP Julian has no trousers on (to be fair most Brits could work that one out very easily); or that Georgian lady Kitty just wants to be friends with everyone; and Robin the caveman, killed by a prehistoric lightning strike, can control electricity.
I knew Ghosts would connect with me when Pat the deceased scout leader, debating what food he would eat if only he could, went for a full English with white toast that is only buttered once it’s cold. Something tells me Pat would have been prepared to wait an eternity to find someone to cosign on the toast thing but it’s okay Pat, I’m here now.
And as I sit here with a cup of builders’ tea and a plate piled high with chewy, chilly toast, I ponder how you extend a TV show into a movie without just making a feature length sitcom episode, especially when your characters are ghosts who cannot leave the estate they have haunted for up to 10,000 years. It’s quite common to remove the characters from their usual TV-land stomping grounds and drop them somewhere new; even the movie version of TV sitcom Porridge, set in a prison, managed this. It is harder with the dead than the living though.
And yet, the spooks in question do manage to escape the confines of the Button House estate – and (super)naturally, while righting wrongs chaos ensues.
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Starting soon after the end of the TV series and final special, Alison (alive, can see the ghosts), and her husband Mike (alive, can’t see them) have moved out of the rather decrepit Button House and are now bringing up their baby daughter Mia in suburbia. The house is being converted into a hotel, a decision the ghosts are thrilled with, though work has now stopped leaving them bored and listless. Step forward a bunch of crusty eco-warriors, who turn up to protest the hotel’s planned new golf course, and are soon setting up camp and making their case to local reporters.
The spooks are themselves spooked by these intruders, and decide they need to find Alison and get her to sort it all out, which means somehow leaving the estate.
I had seen the early series, and thoroughly enjoyed them, though never got round to finishing the whole run. I won’t lie, right winger Julian was always my favourite, carrying his true blue Thatcherite beliefs into an annoyingly egalitarian afterlife. This time he terrifies some teens holding a seance in the house by sending them a somewhat dated message via the Ouija board to LEAVE EUROPE but failing to add the second word.
The kids do come back, whereupon Julian takes over the body of young Jack, and, finally able to leave the confines of the estate, runs off to find Alison while also enjoying the sweet taste of freedom – 2026 cigarette prices and their accompanying health warnings notwithstanding. (And I’m sure Simon Farnaby loved getting into some long trousers too.)
Poor Jack (Scott Ellis Watson), a teen in foster care who is already feeling scared and unloved, now finds himself stuck in a haunted house with a load of dead people. To make things worse, the longer he and Julian are apart, both risk being lost for ever. Meanwhile Robin develops a thing for one of the protesters, disturbing goings-on are discovered in the Button House basement, and what is “Dick” Move up to, in his constituency office?
The established cast are fantastic and have palpable comic chemistry (unsurprisingly as most of the “ghosts” have been working together since the dawn of children’s TV series Horrible Histories), but the standout is Watson who is terrific: as the scared teen, as Spirit-Jack and, in some scenes where we see him through other characters’ eyes, as Jack-possessed-by-Julian; he has Julian’s mannerisms and ways of speaking down pat.
The whole thing is an absolute hoot, but like the TV series with enough pathos to stop it turning into an unbelievable farce (what do you mean a ghostly caveman living with with a lovesick romantic poet and a WW2 army captain aren’t believable). Pat (Jim Howick) helping Thomas the poet learn to ride a bike reminds him of teaching his own son; Kitty (Lolly Adefope) wants to dance but doesn’t have any music; Julian discovers Tory rail network reforms he championed have resulted not in more competition but in higher prices (okay maybe not that last one).
As the other ghosts also manage to leave the Button estate and venture into the outside world, their exuberant joy at “life”, crime solving and helping their friends is lovely to watch, not least when Pat upgrades from teen’s bicycle to stolen police Astra.
The peril in Ghosts: the Possession of Button House may be mild but the stakes are high, the conclusion satisfying every urge for karma. And the audience might come out of the cinema with a more sympathetic appraisal of any undead sharing their homes and communities. The live audience anyway – the dead ones haunting your local cinema screen probably haven’t recovered from Cats.
Read my plot recap for Ghosts: The Possession of Button House here.
Watch the trailer for Ghosts: The Possession of Button House:
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