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By the time the original UK version of Ghosts came to a close, the show had become an international phenomenon, and characters like Thomas Thorne, Robin, The Captain, and Kitty becoming household names in their home country. As revealed during the Ghosts: Brought to Life panel at MCM x EGX 2024, however, when planning first started happening for the show, things looked very different indeed.

“It began with brainstorming just any ideas we could think of for a new thing that we could do. And the first thing we ruled out was anything modern dress, because it just feels like it would be really disappointing for our fans to see us in an office wearing trousers and shirts,” series co-creator Mathew Boynton told the London crowd. (The show’s creators and cast had, before Ghosts, become known for similarly hit shows Horrible Histories and Yonderland.) “The blank canvas can be a real problem, because you can think of anything, so you think of nothing. In a way, it’s good to have restrictions, but we were looking for an idea that would involve a sort of dressing up box feel, like all of our other stuff had, and that would allow us to play multiple characters, which was originally the thinking.”

Pulling from the new book Ghosts: Brought to Life — which details the origins of the show, and was officially the purpose of the panel — the audience got to hear about some ghosts that didn’t make it into the finished show, including “Nazi bombers who fell out over a girl before they were shot down,” and “Ancient William, who is in fact a six-year-old boy.” Boynton argued that those characters were good examples of how the show didn’t waste any idea.

“They sort of didn’t make it, but then they should up in other forms,” he shared. “There’s a scene in the last episode of series 1, where they go house hunting and they’re trying to find a place that isn’t haunted, and there’s two Nazi bombers who are floating outside the window of a flat they go to see, so these ideas do sort of often end up sort of surfacing in just the right place. And then there’s Ancient William… we had this idea that the wisest one would be the one who’s been there the longest, regardless of their age. That was the idea, it would be a child who would be the wisest one. And then we realized that, if we were lucky enough to get two or three series, a child would grow up, and we can’t deal with that with the ghost rules. You can brush out my grey hairs, but you can’t stop a child aging.”

Ghosts: Brought to Life is available now. The US version of Ghosts continues to air new episodes every Thursday.

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