In the show, Mary wears a blue and yellow dress with a white bonnet that was inspired by 17th Century Dutch artist Vermeer’s painting “The Milkmaid”. Though there aren’t (yet) any publicly available pictures of it, in the pilot, she had a look that she and Jim Howick jokingly describe on the BBC’s Inside… Ghosts podcast as “Cher Comes Down the Chimney”.
Seventeenth century peasant ghost Mary had been created specifically for Wix. The victim of a witch trial who’d been burned at the stake, Mary’s costume and make-up in the show itself have touches of soot and she has the ability to emit the smell of burning when living people passed through her. In the mini-pilot though, she was constantly surrounded by a cloud of actual smoke.
Mat Baynton explained on same podcast episode, “before every single take, someone had to go in and put smoke up through Katy’s costume so that it would be billowing.” A crew-member crouched under Katy’s skirts wafting a billows. “It was such an unsustainable idea, like, what were we thinking?! How on earth did we think we could do that for a whole series?”
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“I would have actually loved it, I think,” said Wix. “I would have had to have been on wheels, like on a skateboard, and he would be permanently sat on a skateboard and we’d just move as one for the whole thing!”
Humphrey’s Hi-Tech Head
How they achieved the headless effect for Elizabethan ghost Humphrey was another big change from the taster episode. “He was a more hi-tech visual effect that would have been very difficult to do long-term,” Rickard tells Den of Geek.
“With a guy in the suit, you could always shoot it and it was all in camera. When [director] Tom Kingsley came on board, he bought a lot of ways of doing either lo-fi visual effects or on-camera special effects that just made it all far more achievable on the time and budget of a sitcom.”
