‘After rehearsal, my face hurts from laughing!’ The Ghosts cast on fun, fame and their festive farewell

‘It kind of is Beckett, but it’s um … silly Beckett’, says Mathew Baynton. Photograph: Guido Mandozzi/BBC/Monumental

Thanks, I tell the creators of Ghosts sarcastically, for making my daughter cry. The evening before, my family watched the supernatural sitcom’s final episode, and the only dry eyes in the house were mine.

This reaction, I tell Martha Howe-Douglas, Laurence Rickard, Jim Howick and Mathew Baynton over Zoom call, is going to be replicated across Britain. Did you think about how you were going to ruin everybody’s Christmas when you wrote this tearjerker? “Ah, you can but dream,” says Baynton, who plays the Romantic poet Thomas, wistfully.