As the haunters of Button House hit the big screen with a plot about an escaped phantom, we hear how the team just missed each other too much – and why grunting Robin may get his own show

When the final episode of Ghosts was aired in December 2023, the sitcom felt as if it had reached a definitive conclusion. The show’s central relationships, between Charlotte Ritchie’s Alison and the ghosts who haunt her tumbledown inherited manor house, were neatly tied up, as they encouraged her to sell the place to a hotel developer. It was a tearjerker of an episode for the millions of people who watched it, as well as for the cast and crew behind the scenes.

“We had stopped the series with genuinely no intention of coming back,” explains the show’s co-creator Mathew Baynton, who also stars as the callow romantic poet Thomas. “We were all in tears on the last day of filming,” he says, now perched on the uncomfortable end of a chaise lounge in a London hotel suite.

Are film-makers wary of alienating increasingly sensitive audiences by offing a pooch? Or is humanity now just too soft to deal with the trauma of a Turner & Hooch?

There was a time, not so long ago, when watching a film was a clearcut experience. There would be a good guy and a bad guy, and you would know who the bad guy was because they would shoot a dog in the face.

It happened more times than you might expect. Mad Max 2, dog gets shot. Revenge, dog gets shot. Turner & Hooch, dog gets shot. Red, dog gets shot. Man with the Gun, dog gets shot. Badlands, dog gets shot. Dog Soldiers, you’ll never guess.

Who will survive the deadly game of hide and seek in the woods? Join us here for every single moment of treachery and backstabbing

Romesh enters, and explains everything. Flashback to last night: the traitors knock on a Rob’s door. Ross Kemp leaves to freak about nothing for another day, while Rob Beckett is brown bread.

Because now it’s breakfast. Maya, Hannah, Michael and James Blunt sit down and grimace. Joe Lycett knocks on the door so hard that he hurts his hand, and then becomes excited about eggs. James Acaster enters, eats a boiled egg with his bare hands and declares that he enjoys murdering people eye to eye. And then Leigh-Anne enters and explains everything.

You’re Paul McCartney. So how come you’re still getting het up at a fictional version of you being marginally smaller than a fictional version of John Lennon?

There has been a lot of discourse and conjecture surrounding Sam Mendes’s forthcoming Beatles biopics. Some of this is logical (will people really turn out to see four near-identical films on the same day?), some creative (what animal did they have to shave to make John Lennon’s Abbey Road beard?). At every turn the film has been examined and factchecked and cross-referenced against testimonies from the band’s actual hairdresser.

But until now the remaining Beatles have managed to keep fairly quiet about the whole thing. Last year Ringo Starr mentioned that he’d sat down with Mendes to rework a scene he wasn’t happy with, and Paul McCartney has praised the guitar playing of Paul Mescal, but it appeared that no real red lines had been crossed. Until now.

The faithful have banished one traitor and one of their own. Will they have any more luck tonight?

A quick word on the fallen. Richard, a monkey could have guessed. But the loss of Myha’la is a big one. Why, of everyone, was she banished last night? There are a few theories. The first is that she winked at Richard E Grant during his final round table and, as a commenter smartly pointed out last night, Traitors is literally a game of winking murder. Another option is that she isn’t white, and this is The Traitors, and this sort of thing happens so often that there’s literally an SNL UK sketch about it.

My own theory, though, is that Myha’la just felt things too deeply. She was an emotional player, and the game is so new that contestants don’t need much to latch onto a suspicion. By being a bit too generous with her feelings, she gave them just enough rope to hang her with. A shame, she deserved more.

Director general called for ‘a little less conversation, a little more action’ – but from what other songs could he draw inspiration?

The BBC director general, Matt Brittin, has started the job at a time of huge crisis. Money is short, jobs are being cut and it’s likely entire channels will be culled to stem the tide. This is a moment that requires great motivational charisma, which is why, in a recent all-staff call, he urged BBC employees to be “a bit more Elvis – a little less conversation, a little more action”.

Clearly, this isn’t great. But maybe this is how things are now. Perhaps, if you really want to unite a flagging workforce against a vast and inevitable decline, you need to start quoting song lyrics at them. With that in mind, here are some more that Brittin could use in his next call.

Her unintentional buffoonery and disregard for the game makes Hall this season’s incredible agent of chaos

By rights, Jerry Hall should not still be a participant on The Celebrity Traitors. If there was any justice in the world, the traitors would have murdered her in cold blood at the very start of this Thursday’s episode. The fact they did not speaks volumes about what an absolute legend the woman is.

The crime that should have condemned her to death happened on last Friday’s show, during a mission where everyone had to be buried alive with a partner. Contestants had to choose between waiting to be dug up, or shouting the word “haggis”, which would release them but also make them eligible to be murdered. Needless to say, Hall shouted “haggis” approximately one solitary nanosecond after the game started. Nobody else shouted “haggis”. For sheer weakness in the face of adversity, she deserved to die.

The newly-official French citizen is planning to open an Italian restaurant in Provence. Will it float like his tequila brand or sink as swiftly as the Steven Spielberg submarine eatery that made one reviewer ‘embarrassed to be human’?

The Provençal village of Cotignac is not wanting for places to eat. Within a short drive of its pale stone houses, you can find a wealth of high-end dining options. La Table de Mentone, set within the beautiful Château Mentone wine estate, is famed for the produce it grows on site. The Michelin-starred Restaurant Bruno offers dazzling variations of truffle dishes. More locally, Picotte Provence offers the sort of charming village dining that showcases the best of what the region has to offer.

However, despite all these wonderful options, there is one thing that Cotignac does not yet boast, and that’s a celebrity vanity project. But that is all about to change, thanks to the news that George Clooney is planning to open a restaurant there.