Posted in: BBC, Conventions, Events, Pop Culture, TV | Tagged: ghosts, horrible histories, Lawrence Rickard, martha howe-douglas, mcm, yonderland

The Ghosts And Horrible Histories Team Tease Two New Projects At MCM

Martha Howe-Douglas and Lawrence Rickard of Ghosts, Yonderland, and Horrible Histories tease two new projects at MCM London Comic Con.

Sometimes weird things happen at places like MCM London Comic Con. I wasn't meant to be interviewing Martha Howe-Douglas and Lawrence Rickard, two of the six stars and writers of the BBC sitcom Ghosts, which has become an international phenomenon. The same team, known as Them There or The Six Idiots, alongside Mathew Baynton, Simon Farnaby, Jim Howick, and Ben Willbond, also gave us the educational comedy sketch show Horrible Histories, the film about Shakespeare's missing years, Bill, and the satirical fantasy series Yonderland. As the father of young adults, these are the shows and films they grew up with and enjoyed together. The kids didn't join me at MCM this year, with unconvincing excuses including university work and A-Level prep. Sending them a selfie of me with the two had them gnashing their teeth and regretting their decisions, which is just as I intended.

Two years ago, you couldn't get near them for the signing of their Button House spinoff book, such was the demand at this show. So, basically, it seems that the word about the interviews with the pair went out a little late and clashed with other content, and suddenly I was asked if I'd interview them alone, with no time to prepare. Thankfully, I had been preparing for about fifteen years, without realising it, and I mostly got away with it… I was suddenly in a room far above the rest of the show, with Lady Button and Robin/Godfrey from Ghosts. And my entire parenthood flashed before my eyes.

The Impact of Ghosts and Horrible Histories

This is the first time back to a comic con for Martha, though Lawrence is an old hand now; this is his fourth such show. Martha enthused about the crowds at their tables, "They're amazing. We've got such a legion, haven't we, of fans that are just so enthusiastic and proper die-hard fans, a lot of them through Horrible Histories, Yonderland, all the way through with us, which is so lovely." Lawrence recognised the passage of time, "It's very terrifying because you get like fully grown humans coming up and going, 'You were my childhood' and I'm like, 'Oh, I thought you were my age.' I shared that friends of my daughters, who are graduating in History at Oxford, told me that every student in that class watched Horrible Histories, and I wondered how much they were aware of their impact.

Lawrence recalled "I went to do a talk at the Cambridge [University Student] Union last year and they were like, 'we're moving it to another room because there's just there's too many people' and it's amazing to see because you know in our mind, obviously it was a long time ago that we made it, but you got used to eight-year-olds and their parents coming to see you. But of course, all those 8-year-olds are in their early 20s now and are finishing their degrees. And now you get to the point where we get people who are in jobs, you know, people there's been like a curator who's come up to me, or a history teacher, saying the thing that got us into this was Horrible Histories."

And now, of course, Ghosts has its own international imprint, transforming itself into various versions around the world, including Ghosts USA, Ghosts France, Ghosts Germany, and more. Lawrence recalled, "It's weird when we get to see like the pilots of the international versions. It's like, I always say, it's like looking at a family photo album and going, 'those aren't my real parents.' You're looking at your family and going, "They're being played by other people." Which is very, very strange. And also knowing the script so well of our version, and you can clearly see what scene it is, but obviously, just in a language that you don't understand."

"It's a real honour" shared Martha as Lawrence was "amazed at that sort of footprint, and the people have bought into that as a concept so much, it's nice to see the slant that each country, society and culture puts on it as well and how they use it as a way to rehearse their own histories."

What the Different Series of Ghosts Reveal About the Different Countries

It can also reveal a lot about how a country perceives itself. The original Ghosts delved into some of, for want of a better phrase, Britain's horrible history, but it was notable that the American version of Ghosts declined to have any enslaved characters, for example. Lawrence recalled "when we were doing Horrible Histories, there was always talk about doing an American version, and how they don't like piercing their own history in the same way as  Britains do. British audiences like to look back at British history and go, "God, wasn't it ridiculous?" and America just treats it quite with quite a lot of reverence. And so it was always very interesting." I shared one theory that in the Ghosts USA world, all slaves who died instantly went to heaven, as a small recompense for how badly they had been treated in life, something Martha and Lawrence reacted to with glee. "That's comforting. Okay. Yep."

Thinking about character backstories, I asked if there were any aspects of the characters they had created that didn't make it to the screen. Lawrence recalled that for Robin the caveman, "We always put it in with Robin in the book. We had a line in a really early episode where Julian stops and goes, 'age before beauty,' and Robin says, 'I'm 23.' And we never found another spot for it. So when we did the book, we put his age in when we show the timeline to say it is canon, Robin is 23. He has just lived a very hard life."

Which led me to enthuse about the Button House book and, especially, the audio version, led me to ask if there was any way to revisit Ghosts in such a fashion, "to keep them alive," as Martha put it. I presumed I would get the usual no, about how people have moved on, they don't like to look back, and they have new and exciting projects planned. But maybe not. "There are always things that are being discussed, you know, theoretically we could always look into doing that. And there are a couple of things that we've been kicking around, but it's partly it's sort of finding times and our availability, you know, having six people is always tricky to juggle and obviously the things that in terms of production and money and all of the things that are out of our hands."

Well, some of them do keep going off and doing these big blockbuster movies and things. "But hopefully, we can at some point, we'll find the time to all block out the same window of time and do something else together. I think everyone's keen." "Yes, absolutely", echoed Martha. As to whether it might be old or new? "There are a couple of things; there's something potentially new. There's something where we might slightly look back. It's all up in the air just because it's dependent on so many variables and getting diaries to align. But hopefully there will be a thing… or things." Martha confirmed, "I think we love working together. It's the most fun we have. So it won't be at the end of us at all, but we're certainly trying to find something."

The Ambition of Yonderland and How It Would Have Been Different Now

I asked about Yonderland, how it seems now to have an aspiration that television production only caught up with a few years later, as streaming services hit. I could imagine a fully realised, huge production version of Yonderland, but I was also not entirely sure I would want that. Lawrence agreed.  "When we were first talking about Yonderland, there was so much of it that was going to be on location. It came about from messing around in the woods while we were filming Horrible Histories and going 'imagine if we could do a show, you know, a fantasy show and talking about things like Krull and Dark Crystal and stuff, there was quite a lot of Labyrinth and things with quite a lot of locations and then it ended up being all in studio, but actually that became its aesthetic. I remember the episode where one of the Ninnies was fired into the sun. And trying to find the version of the VFX that didn't look too good. With the puppets, you can't put them next to a Hollywood-style VFX because they then look like they come from a different world. And so we were constantly going 'That's great. Can you make it look worse?'"

Bill, The Little Shakespeare Film That Could

After a little stumble from my lack of preparation, we also got onto Bill, their Shakespeare movie that disappeared in the cinema, and exactly why that went down. Lawrence went to town on what went right and what went wrong. "We were very lucky in that part of the reason that got made was we had a partner who came with the finance, and part of that was a distribution… and they got out of the distribution game about eleven weeks before the film came out. And so we had to get another distributor who came in and were brilliant and worked with us wonderfully, but it was so late in the day, even moving the release date, which we did. So, suddenly, our distribution and PR budget was cut to 10% of what it was going to be, and we had to move the release date out of the holidays into term time, but we couldn't move the screens that were booked. So they were all during school hours. So there were just two or three factors that happened quite late in the day, which meant we couldn't tell anyone it existed. There just wasn't the money there, despite a lot of willing and a lot of work from a lot of people to try and do that. And so we sort of knew what it would be before it came out, which was disheartening."

Though Martha has seen a resurgence. "I think it's found a new life now because obviously Ghosts has kind of reignited us as a group, and it's always on Christmas, my mum loves it, and I do think people are discovering it. Well, obviously, it's not on the scale that we would have liked it to be, but it's lovely that it's still circulating, which is amazing. Yeah." And to be fair, it also looks gorgeous. Lawrence recalled, "Back then, I think our entire production budget was like four and a half million. I remember going to really early meetings about that, and we're saying, well, it's set in Tudor times, and they go, 'well, that's five million. Carry on. And that was your baseline without sort of trying to pay for a cast and a crew and everything else. And so to find a version of that for the budget we had and then for it to look that good, we were absolutely blown away by what they're able to put on screen."

Addressing the Double Audience

I also asked how Horrible Histories was a kids' show that found an adult audience, and how Ghosts was initially a show broadcast in an adult timeslot but found a kids audience and saw the show moved for the second series to accommodate that, and what it was about their work that seemed to stretch across the ever-widening generational divides. Martha told me, "I think we just write what we think is funny, and I think some of our humour is quite childish." Larence echoed, "Yeah, we are quite childish people." Martha continued, "We are, aren't we? I don't really know the formula. It's just something that I guess, because we started maybe in Horrible Histories, and so therefore we've had that kind of anarchic kind of sense of humour, and that it's a bit naughty. It's a bit on the edge."

Lawrence defined this as "we are in school, but we are the naughtiest child in the class, and that sort of keeps you quite honest and also just a very good like temperature check with each other that when writing something if someone puts their hand up and go I'm not sure, that feels like that's a bit too close, to the line. We always sort of said that if it explains something that you know, maybe a kid shouldn't hear that, then that's when it's gone too far. But there are a number of things that we do where adults are laughing and kids are going 'What?'" Martha added, "And then they discover it later."

Lawrence explained the history, "With the time slot thing, we always pitched it as just before watershed, and then a really good slot came up for series one that was taking over from Alan Partridge. And so they knew it worked a comedy worked in that slot and so we moved into that and then I think the channel felt the same, and it was so well received thankfully, the only criticism was why is this on at 9:30 and so they we moved it to where we always saw it which was you know 8:30 BBC 1, that's what we we pitched."

The great comedy teams seem to happen by accident, whether Monty Python, The Goodies, The Young Ones, Goodness Gracious Me or Absolutely, emerging from other projects, so I wondered what made the six of them, amongst the many actors and writers in Horrible Histories, be the ones that gelled together.

Martha told me, "When we were coming to the end of Horrible Histories, we didn't want to stop working together, and I think that it came from we used to hang out like we were always really good friends as well, that it wasn't just that we were on a set and we would say hello on set. We would hang out at lunchtimes like the boys would do little skits in their trailers… it was always a great friendship, and it had great chemistry, and I think we just got lucky.

Lawrence remembers, "Me, you, Matt, Jim, and Ben ended up just being scheduled together a lot. And then Simon was like this mystical visit from a crazy uncle. He would be in for two or three weeks, but when he came in, it was like brilliant. And we're like, this mad guy has just turned up and Ben and Jim knew him already. It was never like we put a wall around it and said it's just six of us." Martha confirmed it was "just really naturally like that."

And in the years since, had anything come close to splitting them up? I got an instant, simultaneous negative. Lawrence admitted "rvery now and then there there's the odd cross word" which Martha explained as "we're a family" and Lawrence confirmed "It's exactly like that and it tends to be about a script and it's you know trying to make the best thing you can and at the end of the day it's not and when I say at the end of the day – I don't mean like a football pundit, I mean literally at 5 pm when we go out the room,  there's not even a question of "oh of sorry about earlier." Cause everyone knows that it's the pressure of trying to make the best thing, but there's never been a bust-up."

I said that sounded sickening. "I sort of feel bad about it. I keep trying to fall out with them," said Lawrence. Martha remembered, "When we were doing Yonderland, we had Steven Fry on, and he walked past our green room one day, and he was like, 'Do you guys actually eat lunch together as well?' He couldn't believe that we were still hanging out. There are lots of different personalities within that mix. And I think that's part of why it works, you know. There's more forthright people, there's more relaxed people, it's um it's a good mix and I think I think it just works." "It's six very different people with the same sense of humour."

Though suggesting that the group were in danger of heading towards national treasure status. Lawrence joked, "I want a knighthood… and I don't want any of you to have a knighthood." "That would be a fallout. I'm sure." "So we can't fall out until I, and only I, have got a knighthood." It's only a matter of time, isn't it?

The Future For Them There/The Six Idiots

But now, what is to come? Lawrence Rickard tells us, "I've just finished working on Amandaland, the Motherland spin-off that I'm co-writing with Holly Walsh, and they started filming that this week. I'm going in and playing a little part on that as well, a little cameo role. So that's sort of taken us up to, uh, Christmas and then there's a couple of new things starting in the new year…" Indeed, as he previously teased. As for Martha Howe-Douglas, "I've just written a tour in association with the Tower of London River Cruise, so which is launching now for half term. So, I've written a script, it's a tour from Tower of London to Westminster and actors are delivering the script… a historical tour down the Thames." Okay, I am definitely going to that. Maybe even persuade the kids to join me. And for everything else as a comedy team… "it's bubbling." When might we learn something? Could we get a Christmas present, for example? "It may be a Christmas present. It could be a Christmas present. There may be one." Start hanging up your stockings now.

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