And then, suddenly, it floated away: one of the finest British comedies of the century is over, and it’s ended with a Christmas special so light and so neat it barely seemed to be there at all. Ghosts, thoughtful and kind to the end, has quietly said goodbye.
In the fifth and last full season earlier this year, Alison and Mike (Charlotte Ritchie and Kiell Smith-Bynoe) prepared to become parents, with the erratic help of the spirits that inhabit the creaky stately home the young couple live in. An offer to buy the decrepit house and its damp lawns came in from investors wishing to convert the property into a country club. Alison, who can see and talk to the ghosts, and Mike, who cannot, agreed to turn down a life-changing amount of money to stay in the place they love – but we suspected that, with one more episode still to come, they wouldn’t stay for long.
We reappear inside Button House just in time to meet Alison and Mike as they return from the hospital with baby Mia, and an unwelcome companion. Mike’s fussy mother Betty (Sutara Gayle) is in tow, promising to stay “just for a few days, until you get into the swing of things”. Seven weeks later, Christmas is coming and Betty is still there, meddling in every aspect of Mia’s care – to the annoyance of ghostly Edwardian lady of the manor Fanny (Martha Howe-Douglas), who thinks that’s her job.
Many of the undead are unsettled. Robin the caveman (Laurence Rickard) is struggling to find his usual Christmas spirit, while the Captain (Ben Willbond) wants to take advantage of the fact that infants can see ghosts by soothing Mia with baby talk, something his clipped wartime idiom doesn’t lend itself to. As so often, the biggest laughs come from moping Regency poet Thomas (Mathew Baynton), who nobly puts his ardour for Alison aside, ignoring that his love remains unrequited as he urges her to control her desires and remain faithful to her new family: “Think of the child!”
Then Betty gets a fanciful idea into her head, becoming convinced that the building is haunted. She is, of course, correct – she did see an object move, because roguish 80s MP Julian (Simon Farnaby) is the one ghost who can do that – so the living and the dead have to work together to con her into believing she was mistaken and restore peace to the house.
That, more or less, is that. There isn’t the big tearful hit provided by last year’s Christmas special, when goofy scout leader Pat (Jim Howick) posthumously realised how much his family loved and respected him via the discovery of an old VHS tape, in one of those storylines it’s hard to even think about without misting up. There’s no pantomime or other major Christmassy set piece. The last Ghosts is nearly too uneventful.
But Ghosts has already ascended into the sitcom sublime. That fifth season was a long farewell, filling in the death stories for the Captain, dippy Georgian noblewoman Kitty (Lolly Adefope) and decapitated Tudor gentleman Sir Humphrey Bone (Rickard, once again). Affairs were put in order. The show’s writers – Baynton, Howick, Farnaby, Howe-Douglas, Rickard and Willbond – have always brought a deft wisdom to their creation, knowing exactly when to be rude and when to be sentimental, when to be chaotic and when to be calm. They will also have clocked that although everyone says sitcoms can theoretically go on for ever, in practice the ones with any emotional heft have to keep moving their characters on. The moment when those imaginary friends have all been fully fleshed out is, bittersweetly, when it’s time to let them go.
All of that keys into a final episode that is, typically, cleverer and spikier than it looks. The quest to rid the household of an annoying grandma is itself a telling, very slightly daring tale about the frustrations and rewards of Christmas visits from family, but it elegantly sets up the perfectly judged closing scenes, which display one of the signs that a sitcom has achieved classic status: when those buffoons who have made us giggle so many times reveal themselves to be rounded, compassionate people who were never really as daft as they seemed.
Granting the silly, cartoonish ghosts agency in how Ghosts ends is one more expert creative decision, a gentle surprise that makes total sense. What’s not a surprise at all is that a show about life and death and remembrance and renewal should have managed its own demise so beautifully. Now its work is done, Ghosts is ready to depart. We will fondly miss it.
• Ghosts Christmas Special was on BBC One and is available on iPlayer.
