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.”
