A drunken monk, a hotel receptionist and a Victorian nanny: meet characters cut from BBC Ghosts

Now, thanks to the new book behind the scenes published by Bloomsbury, we know. With interviews with the cast and creators, as well as original notes about the promising sitcom idea, here are the characters who almost made it to Ghosts.

A hotel porter and a Victorian nanny

The notes, taken by Matthew Baynton after two days spent refining the “haunted hotel idea” with his co-creators Jim Howick, Ben Wilbond, Lawrence Rickard, Simon Farnaby and Martha Howe-Douglas, outline a version of the show in which the stately home has been recently converted into hotel. In that early version, the ghosts try to haunt the living residents, but instead of causing an accident that would allow someone alive to see and hear them, they accidentally commit actual murder by scaring a hotel doorman into an elevator shaft.

Then this porter/handler would join the ghosts and fall in love with the ghost of a Victorian nanny (“she takes care of all the dead children,” Baynton’s notes explain), who would be “very honest and resentful of almost anything anybody says.” .

A drunken monk and a pious nun

Photo in Animated ghosts shows Ben Wilbond in traditional monk’s garb playing chess with an early caveman version of Robin. The mentioned monk was supposed to live in the wine cellar of the house, where he was “forever drunk with his beer”, having drunk himself to death with the monastery’s fortified wine. Another note indicates that the monk was supposed to try to keep the vow of silence, but he was constantly tested.

Along with the drunken monk was the idea for a pious nun who would later become Lady Button, recalls Martha Howe-Douglas, who writes: “Looking back at the notes from this meeting, it seems that the first iteration of Lady Button was a nun who spent her life in pious celibacy and, not being at the pearly gates, was now loud and self-confident.”

Druid, Nazi bombers, unhappily married, soot shaker…

Other characters mentioned that were written out include a bearded druid, a soot shaker, a pair of bickering Nazi pilots (who probably evolved into the Luftwaffe pilots Helmut and Wolfgang depicted in the first series), a Joan of Arc character in chain mail, six- a one-year-old boy named Ancient William, an eerie Woman in Black who does not speak but hovers on the ceiling, “a pair of Roundheads playing football in the playground with a severed head,” an idle cooking staff in the kitchen, and “a peasant and his wife who hated each other until the moment the husband killed his wife and then accidentally died and ended up spending eternity in her company.”