Medium-high spirits: "Ghosts: The Possession of Button House"

Just in time for Hallowe'en, a big-screen offshoot from the sitcom that became an exportable format, the new holy grail of cash-strapped British broadcasters. Full disclosure: I decided, after only a couple of episodes, that Ghosts wasn't quite my tempo, being on some level a kids' show - recognisably the next project of the team who'd triumphed with Horrible Histories - elevated (again successfully, by most accounts) into the very heart of primetime. Arriving with an unmistakable air of the Children's Film Foundation about it - I say that as far from a diss, as someone raised on Egghead's Ghost and such like - The Possession of Button House leans even more heavily into that juvenilia, possibly hoping to draw back the crowds who massed at the multiplex for co-writer/star Simon Farnaby's Paddington and Magic Faraway Tree reboots. Now there are teenagers (on BMXs!) breaking into the haunted pile left abandoned at the end of the final episode, temporarily pausing developers' plans to repurpose Button House as a swanky hotel-restaurant complex. To sound the alarm, the House's spectral residents elect to send one of their own out into the wider world; unfortunately, for their hopes, their chosen candidate is disgraced Tory MP Julian (Farnaby, trouserless but otherwise apparently modelled on Robert Kilroy-Silk) who co-opts the slouchy human form of one delinquent (Scott Ellis Watson, the young John Davidson in I Swear), while his fellow ghosts - caveman, closeted major, kooky aristocrat, clueless Northern scout leader, surprise heartthrob Mathew Baynton et al. - keep the lad's spirit occupied (or hostage). By hook or by crook, all the Ghosts will end up wearing children's clothes, and they will all end up pedalling Raleigh Choppers into the climax; somewhere in here is a parable of middle-aged creatives attempting to rediscover their youth (while recreating their hit TV show's halcyon days).

As with Horrible Histories, that original show was the handiwork of emerging character actors determining to wrestle back some control over their careers - or simply give themselves something fun to do between more routine gigs - by penning their own material. They're all back here, even Charlotte Richie and Kiell Smith-Bynoe as the couple who left Button House at the end of the series, and the great Geoff McGovern as meddling neighbour Barclay. It's just that this team are now writing something to do while a simultaneously flimsy and convoluted plot untangles itself around them. We get flickers of creative inspiration: an early, choice Brexit gag (given away for free in the teaser trailer) chimes nicely with the breezy national seachange around that once-accursed topic. Mostly, the comedy is mined from safe, familiar, very British subjects: the cost of train travel, Juliet Bravo, the Honey Monster, stinging nettles, Rennies. (There is one expert deployment of the still-underused term "boffins".) The obvious limitation is that the Ghosts remain sitcom creations, impervious to significant or lasting change: occasional flashbacks reveal their younger selves doing the same thing they're doing today, while the grand finale leaves them where they've always been, with just a few more rounds to play in their eternal trivia quiz. Still, if it's certainly never as boldly inventive as, say, The League of Gentlemen's Apocalypse - still the high watermark in the sitcom-to-film channel, undertaken by folks who knew what separates movies from television and who proved willing to try something radical with established characters - this isn't Holiday on the Buses, either: instead, we're watching a well-drilled ensemble getting back into their collective groove while taking a lap of honour. At a time when so little original comedy is being commissioned for either film or television, it does feel as if we're having to make do with an extended TV special: Button House will doubtless air on BBC1 next Christmas, and it'll lose nothing essential in the transition. But reader, I cannot lie: I did titter.

Ghosts: The Possession of Button House is now playing in cinemas nationwide.