Jim Howick

Pat Butcher stands about in Ghosts (2019) wearing a scoutmaster’s uniform, with an arrow still through his neck. Lucy Williams’s costume establishes the joke before Howick speaks; his upbeat, slightly hapless manner gives us a reason to keep watching after we have noticed it. We grew fond of Pat because Howick lets him remain well-meaning despite that absurd appearance. Will Hanke’s plain daylight helps: this is an ordinary man in an ordinary room, except for the fairly substantial injury.

That ability to belong in a busy cast has shaped his work as a writer, too. Horrible Histories (2009) brought him together with Mathew Baynton, Simon Farnaby, Martha Howe-Douglas, Laurence Rickard and Ben Willbond, the group known as Them There. Their subsequent work included the fantasy comedy Yonderland (2013) and the ensemble film Bill (2015), before Howick co-created and co-wrote Ghosts. The important development was giving a performer accustomed to quick-change historical sketches characters who could stay around long enough for us to care about them.

The series benefits from treating Howick as one member of the household rather than its designated centre. Pat’s uniform sits alongside Farnaby’s half-dressed Julian and Willbond’s uncreased Captain, with the costumes keeping a nine-strong ensemble immediately legible. As co-creator and writer, Howick shares credit for a sitcom that is gentle without being slack about its jokes. The hotel plot goes nowhere, however, and the third series sometimes crowds its jokes with too many stories, leaving individual characters too little time.

Ghosts: The Possession of Button House (2026), directed by Simon Hynd, makes a sensible choice by giving Julian the central possession plot and bringing Pat back among the familiar ensemble. Howick returns as both writer and performer, and the film finds enough comic variety in that company to justify the longer outing. It also works without prior knowledge of the sitcom, though another adventure with familiar characters is largely what it offers. Start with Ghosts for Howick; choose the film when spending more time with the whole household sounds like sufficient reason.