The cast of Ghosts on their horror sitcom | The BFI + Radio Times TV festival

it must be a huge relief even though you kind of know it's funny when you hit a long time I guess they start to rub off a little bit when you hear an audience like that just laughing away I mean you usually don't know the last time you can work together acid ensemble was on yonder land and you've continued to go out and do your own projects and and and in the big wide world but what was it that brought you back for this project were there other things you talked about or how did you get to ghosts we talked about a number of ideas we sort of when we were still doing young glam we you know we're always not thinking about what would be the next thing won't be the next nothing sort of lost forever and we talked about doing a sketch show we talked about various other narrative ideas and then I think just after we've made series three we were of young glam we were sort of thinking about whether or not if the author came to do a forth whether or not we do it and at that point we kind of rented a room and sat down and went for what would be the next thing and ghost we wanted it to be sort of you know to some degree multi character and to do all the silly things we do and go to came up 12 and day one and because it came up on day one we went well that can't be the right out there so chase the number of other door we we should have gone with my brexit idea I think someone's kind of doing that comedy and in terms of the BBC obviously gave you the development opportunities then go away and and do something with this you write seven little groups or individually but you together come up with the concept for the whole series to you how does that work ideas around don't we as a group and then so when so we kind of come up with an outline basically of the episode or the or the whole series and then by the time whatever combination of people are going off to write their episodes you kind of have a really clear outline you sometimes have whole bits of dialogue jokes and stuff so you kind of piece it all together and then we come back to the room and we sort of bash that about again and so it's quite collaborative but even though people have written their own episodes you can't the material which is great so it means if something gets a really big laugh I know exactly the jokes over it yeah I think we knew pretty early on when we started talking about what periods what ghosts what characters it was pretty obvious yeah I mean I was I really came to initially when we started talking about it we were all going to play an awful lot of character and we realized quite early on that was going to be production wise quite possible but my sort of main character when we were initially developing it was going to be a headless Humphrey character and I said you know a caveman we liked the idea of doing ghosts that were outside of that sort of traditional Elizabethan world war two chunk of history and so we'd like to have anybody modern ghosts and really old ghosts we said we should have a cavemen for some reason nobody ever thinks of there being caveman ghosts and I was like I'll do it I don't do it every day both the roles you took involved north lot of makeup but actually putting not as many lines as the other guys yeah I mean it's it swings and roundabouts I mean the good thing actually the with headless Humphrey I'm the head but we have another very lovely man called Yanni who's the body so most he looks like an awful lot of work from the neck down I am taking a day off so Robin actually is surprisingly articulate but not in this series in this episode we're five series outline he studies for his PhD he's he's been around the longest so he's actually the wisest once and there are moments where his wisdom suddenly shines through and he makes all of the others we like the idea that yet he'd taken a lot of information but the speech center of his brain is that big so it's kind of a struggle with sound and being the most attractive of you that yet again without his trousers he's got the best legs he's incredibly small team and he's very athletic when you actually then moving to rehearse and film to bits with change particularly show where you're establishing your character the first time as you kind of get into the characters a bit more do you find that bits of change we've we've always tried to leave room to to ad-lib it usually tends to be at the end of a scene that you just sort of leave the cameras rolling and see what comes but actually there's a whole bit from Katie that was hardly at the beginning of the basket we'd written I think the last two lines of to give an impression that there'd been a long speech about how to make wicker baskets and Katy improvised a load of stuff that was too good to leave out and we learned a lot from from doing I mean we actually we made a tester a tester taster tape kind of a mini pilot of the show and at the time we thought we were gonna do a real multi character number and that final scene where she can see the ghost and they're all behind Mike was gonna be like a hundred ghosts it was gonna be us multiplied all over the place and then the more we thought about the show the more we realized the theme was about it was purgatory it was about being stuck with people that you really don't get on with and you're stuck there forever and if you have a community of a hundred people you can escape the people you don't like you know so it we that's a massive change that came from from doing and yeah so things are kind of always open to change I think if anything felt wildly wrong in the first week of shooting we would go back to the scripts and I'm talking and I may be wrong but as I understand it the initial kind of premise for the show was actually geared towards a more family orientated audience is that right or was it always exactly when I think we originally thought we'd do something that was adults and then were persuaded probably rightly to keep it right to keep it family it's got a post watershed school and now it's it was going to possibly be pre watershed and I think the reason it couldn't be was the scary stuff you know we haven't written lots of I know somebody does somebody does call me a prick by dealing with me got it on camera line was meant to be lucky wasn't it yes we'll be Robocop and the shining obviously one things really important is the sort of the feel of the show and I know that finding the right director for he was very important tell us why you're the right man under this incredible pitch I mean he pitched to us with this enormous document that just spoke to what we wanted from the show yeah he'd reference loads of horror tropes and you know at the same time explaining how he could film everything in camera we'd like to have conversations about how to practically achieve what we wanted to do how to capture the tone what you know sort of asking questions going but how we do that how we do that and without then having ever the conversation with Tom it was like we were presented with a document which was all of the answers and so at that point we were just learning this kind of it was almost spooky how he sort of had references that would you know we there was one in there was a film called lay visitor which we talked about a lot which is great yeah it was like he'd read our minds so but also he's in a real always and having the confidence to be able to do those visual effects and not have a sort of a whole team of people holding up production every day to have conversations about those things endlessly I mean this is the most challenging shoot I think we've all of our shoes have been challenging but this is the most with it most scenes have eight or ten characters in them and it's a DVD budget a TV schedule we would look at the schedule every day and say that we'll go over today and then Tom would deliver the whole schedule every day I'd say bar to consistent grouping one of the things he talked about when we met him was let's not make it a school photo every time because you've so you can't you can't do singles of everyone in every in every scene you have to group them together and you know that's a really simple thing but incredibly well thought through to me considering how he would group us in ways that was visually interesting and didn't just become flat and boring the writing drew things in I know with you and Lonnie did the same thing you could have we pair off with different groups of you and so forth how is that decided to who's going to work together and and I don't think this set in stone really we work with keys in a hat it really comes down to who's available at the time and who's around and I think that Matt and I had sort of quite a quiet summer last year so and we lived close the closest to each other so yeah postcode I suppose is right in that was there but yeah I mean ya wrote some episodes for you underlined the last series together and it seems to go well you're inferring they're gymnasts that you chose to work for me because I live it's a marriage of convenience I made you great lunches do this in front of all these people I mean made you some great lunches he did no it's really there's no there's no there's no it's not set in stone basically this is very premise your question but have you thought about where you might go to where it's be recommissioned oh yeah they don't help but do that with everything that you that you create and write you always thinking longer-term there were conversations were you know what we've been waiting to go and we were filming and someone would go you know we could do and the number of things that came up with you can of course yes I was about to say one but then you can no don't do that because you feel terrible spoiler there was a lovely idea with the phone that's really funny but also this feels like the first thing we've done you know as writers that it's classic sitcom repeatable sort of Underland was a serial you know had a series arc and while we were making series three we were aware that it wouldn't get better if we made another one run its course really it feels like it could go on for a really we've got this huge ensemble of characters whose histories we want to explore we sort of some of their deaths are revealed as the series go goes on but there's a lot of mystery as well around some of them so we'd love to do this of the sitcom oh but it has got that kind of horror sort of genre influence and it has got a really so strong narrative running through it as well in terms of you do want to learn more about these characters you want to learn I mean it's beyond just being a lot of funny things going on you really want to know the story of whether it's gonna become a hotel what they're gonna think now that you can see the ghost where that's gonna take them and there are other twists I think it's throughout the series that continues I mean I've seen the first two and already in the second episode there are more kind of twists undeveloped I can only imagine I'm gonna continue yeah I think that's kind of you know that definitely sort of speaks well in terms of its futures now yeah and we have all the ghosts back stories as well to investigate if we as a nice little box go sound for the river because of the way you boards been right on his own but just by the natural anima T he wrote really lovely episode for his courage to be who he is and where houses of parliment probably just to see how all this mess turns out [Laughter] [Applause] the dressing room good luck guys can you come out onto the pitch where is instruction dressing come back I guess they won he's great yes yeah find the things that you know play well for the comedy moments but also to capture the the horror 8 I think you would have been easy to find someone who kind of could play one or the other but struggled with the one that wasn't their strength but I think needed to be it needed it needed the drama and the dramatic and all those all fills that that serve the drama but at the same time it's still search the Conte it's very clever thing to do he's excellent all created the show and you're acting it and you've sort of got a sort of showrunner kind of credit all of you together does that mean that you were over a lot those kind of details like the music I think we were over more of the details than it was fair to Tom [Laughter] [Music]

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Views: 175,324

Rating: 4.9670124 out of 5

Keywords: British Film Institute (Publisher), British, film, institute, films, movie, movies, cinema, BFI, Ghosts, BBC, sitcom, horror, comedy, history, Radio Times TV festival, TV, television, writing, acting

Id: 9aN5rwtPA54

Length: 17min 28sec (1048 seconds)

Published: Wed May 15 2019