Ghosts review – a silly sitcom that will make you die laughing

The Greek playwright Aeschylus died when an eagle dropped a tortoise on his head. The Roman hunchback Diodorus expired when a doctor tried to straighten his spine. These are two of my favourite exits from Stupid Deaths, a recurring sketch in Horrible Histories. For a decade, it has skewed British children’s (and their parents’) sense of the past so much that we can’t list the kings and queens of England, but we all know that the boxer Theagenes of Thasos was giving his rival’s statue a good thumping when it toppled over and did him in.

And now, in Ghosts (BBC One), there is a country house called Button Hall filled with ancestral spirits who died stupid deaths. There is a scoutmaster (Jim Howick) with an arrow through the neck. There is a caveman who speaks better English than Donald Tusk. We don’t know how he died, but the safe money says it was glue poisoning from his appliquéd facial hair.

The dead are mostly played by Horrible Histories veterans, who also wrote the sitcom, as well as Lolly Adefope, fresh from her hilarious turn as Alan Partridge’s nemesis in This Time. In a sense, it is the most unlikely comedy spinoff since Cheers spawned Frasier.

As in Horrible Histories, Marx’s dictum that history repeats itself first as tragedy then as farce gets scotched here: history was farcical from the start. There is a running gag about a beheaded Tudor (Laurence Rickard) whose head shouts “Come back!” as his body wanders off.

One of Ghosts’ pleasures is seeing Horrible Histories veterans in fancy dress once more, notably Matthew Baynton, who once repurposed Eminem’s My Name Is to rap his way through Charles II’s biography (“I love the people and the people love me / So much they restored the English monarchy.”) Here, he plays a romantic poet who can clear a room with an orated ode, a self-involved sensibility in an oversized shirt.

Ghosts isn’t Ibsen, but it does raise thorny existential questions. The ghost of a fictional 90s MP called Julian (Simon Farnaby) wanders Button Hall without trousers, caught forever with his pants down. Will we have to live out all eternity as we were when we died? Lady Button (Martha Howe-Douglas) is doomed to scream nightly as she falls from a window to her death.

Then there is the question of what ghosts are made of. How can a first world war army captain (Ben Willbond) walk through the bedroom door, then lie on his bed? What is the point of the 17th-century witch (Katy Wix) teaching fellow ghosts the rudiments of basketry if their fingers pass through the raw material? Only one of them, Julian, can overcome this shortcoming: if he concentrates really hard, he can sometimes knock a cup off a table.

Into this haunted house stumble a couple of modern-day herberts, Alison and Mike (Charlotte Ritchie and Kiell Smith-Bynoe). They have inherited Button Hall after the last of the Button family died. When they arrive to take stock of the place, the unseen ghosts mill around the couple in the great hall – and some don’t like what they see. “She’s exposing her knees! And she’s got a tattoo!” exclaims the buttoned-up Edwardian Lady Button.

Caveman and poet, though, are bewitched by Alison. Both mistake her for the 80s pop sensation Kim Wilde, even though it is hard to believe that a 19th-century versifier and the unacceptably hirsute missing link between apes and humans would be familiar with Kids in America.

But their fondness curdles into fury when the ghosts find out Alison and Mike are planning to turn their ancestral home into a hotel, which promises to end the eternal peace. “Kill them!” snaps the caveman, understandably.

Julian goes rogue. He uses his kinetic powers to push Alison from a window, but she survives. After a few weeks in an induced coma, she returns to Button Hall sporting a neck brace and a new superpower – she can see ghosts.

It is a treat to have Ritchie in this role: after dying from sepsis in Call the Midwife, it is as if she has been reincarnated in Ghosts as Oregon from the student sitcom Fresh Meat to deploy her formidable armoury of comedy reactions. In Fresh Meat, she had to get used to a lot of unsavoury house mates (libidinous posho Jack Whitehall, libidinous non-posho Zawe Ashton, not to mention that troubled Scottish troll who rarely left his room), so dealing with ghosts with Kim Wilde fixations shouldn’t be a stretch.

In making us giggle at the supernatural, Ghosts is very British – a mashup of Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit and Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased), not to mention the manifold sillinesses of Hammer horrors. But it is American in the sense of having a gag-to-airtime ratio much higher than British sitcoms normally manage these days.

If there is a history lesson to be taken from Ghosts – and there probably isn’t – it is that, if we want to get in touch with the spirit world, we should emulate Alison and fall from a first-floor window. Maybe not: most likely, that would be a really stupid way to die. I would rather have an eagle drop a tortoise on my head any day.