GHOSTS - CAUGHT ON CAMERA

Fact merges with fiction at West Horsley Place, aka ‘Button House’, home to the residents of BBC One’s popular sitcom Ghosts

- Claire Saul

This year certainly won’t be a vintage one for the quantity of TV and film productions, but the quality of those which managed to navigate lockdown is a different matter, as exemplified by the hit BBC comedy series Ghosts which, by the narrowest of margins, managed to complete filming on its much-anticipated second series and a Christmas Special before the nationwide freezeframe. And no more perfect location for this show than West Horsley Place, a property that spans centuries.

“We really couldn’t believe our luck, actually,” says Mathew ‘Thomas Thorne’ Baynton during filming. Alongside him is Jim ‘Pat’ Howick and Laurence ‘Robin’ Rickard, presenting the unlikely trinity of a Romantic poet, a genial scoutmaster and a hairy caveman. “When it came to the reality of trying to find a location we realised that we had to find somewhere that would have stood in Tudor times, for it to have [16th-century character] ‘Headless Humphrey’ right up to Edwardian people and this place was just as if it had been tailormade as if we had conjured it. But aside from that, it is just such a lovely place to come to work every day. We did three series of Yonderland in windowless sound stages, so to actually come to a beautiful location in the middle of the countryside is just lovely.”