TV review: Fanny girl raises the spectre of silly laughs in Ghosts

Irn-Bru’s marketing team got into a lot of trouble by making jokes about someone with the name Fanny many years ago.

It’s not a position I’d like to find myself in, but the writers of BBC2’s returning supernatural sitcom Ghosts don’t have such qualms.

Although the comedy from the writers of Horrible Histories has a bit of a chilly premise – a young couple move into a mansion populated by the spirits of people who died there – things are as warm as ever.

The last series was on post-watershed for no discernable reason, but its new pre-watershed position of 8.30pm seems like a better home for a silly family comedy.

That’s despite the preponderance of jokes involving the aforementioned Fanny.

If you can tolerate those – and indeed laugh like a drain every time someone says: “Oh no, Fanny is exposed” then you’re in for a treat.

Last week saw the spectres go viral – in the nice way when viral things were a positive – when one appeared in a photograph.

That prompted visitors desperate to catch a glimpse of our motley crew of wraiths to pay a visit to the mansion.

Of course none wanted to appear on cue. Apart from maybe the dead Tory MP who died with his trousers round his ankles. He’d appear, he said, in return for a smartphone.

Locked down for hundreds of years? I don’t blame him.

Ghosts BBC2, Monday, 8.30pm

Ratched Netflix, streaming now

Some television is a bit like drilling a hole in your head so it’s good to see one put it up front. Ratched has arrived on Netflix, telling the back story of the terrifying nurse from Ken Kesey’s counter-culture novel One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest.

Sarah Paulson is the manipulative medical professional and she has more than enough creepiness going on behind her placid exterior and precise make-up and hair to make you uncomfortable.

When her expressionless face terrifyingly broke to reveal the true vicious nature behind. I flinched.

Did Ratched perhaps work as a school nurse in 1980s Glasgow…?