Gloriana! This has got to be one of the weirdest coincidences at our blog yet. We just saw Joan Sanderson this morning in The Great Muppet Caper, and here she is again in the only Ghosts two-parter. And she’s really entertaining, too. She plays the ghost of Sir George’s sister, Alexandra, and she is extremely unhappy about how George is allowing all these other ghosts to have free run of the place. A stable boy! In Motley!
I was interested in how Richard Carpenter neatly tied in some previous continuity into this story, answering a couple of questions in the back of my mind. It turns out that Peter Sallis’s character, Gudgin, does indeed still own Motley – he was gifted the hall at the end of series two – but he still needs to sell it because he cannot afford to live in it, and that’s why it’s become all dirty and cobwebby again. I would guess that the taxes must be enormous on a property like this.
Also, they return to the idea that Sir George is also, somehow, able to leave the hall as well as Matt, even though he doesn’t know how he does it. Once they realize that he can get out when he loses his temper, it’s not much help. Crushed under Alexandra’s iron thumb, the poor ghost has got no temper left!
Fire Breathing Dimetrodon Time 