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A full moon looms, a synthesiser gulps and – dun dun duuuuuuuun – we’re off to HMP Gloucester in a Skoda Octavia with Daisy May and Charlie Cooper’s NightWatch (Sunday 26 October, 9.30pm, BBC Two). Why HMP Gloucester? Because the former Victorian prison is, according to our hosts – the titular, Bafta-winning siblings behind peerless mockumentary This Country – “supposedly haunted as hell.” A fitting setting, then, for the first episode of a series that finds lifelong paranormal enthusiasts Daisy May (39) and Charlie (36) stuff their slippers into the aforementioned family hatchback and set off to spend a night bickering and farting “in some of this country’s spookiest places.”
An opening montage offers further elucidation. “Some people want to climb Everest,” explains Charlie while a theremin trembles over footage of the actors staggering like concussed Wombles through a succession of night-time locales. “We just want to see a ghost.” “Yeah,” agrees Daisy May, peering at us over her brother’s shoulder. “We just want to see a ghost.” As do we. Alas, years of low-resolution ITV2 series in which crestfallen celebrity ghost-hunters shout “I think it was just the wind” in abandoned branches of Wetherspoons have prepared us for disappointment. Will NightWatch break with tradition and offer viewers definitive proof of the supernatural? Seems unlikely! Anyway, we must park this question, for now, at the gates of HMP Gloucester, for here is former prison manager Clive, whose sudden appearance in a deserted corridor is met with bellows of terror. “Clive?! OH GOD,” roars Daisy May from the depths of her camouflage-print ankle-length puffer coat. “We thought you were AN APPARITION.”
The mood (intense bewilderment punctuated by sudden bursts of deafening panic) thus established, Clive – who is not AN APPARITION but merely, as stated previously, Clive – proceeds to guide us around his ex-workplace. HMP Gloucester was built in 1792, he tells us, and closed in 2013. It was the site of several outbreaks of typhoid and 123 prisoners were hanged within its now-peeling walls.
“Grim,” murmurs Charlie, a gentle and faintly embarrassed soul who delivers a string of sad one-liners – “sustenance”, “if walls could talk,” etc – in the manner of a minor uncle at a family wake.
While Clive plods off into the night, the siblings prepare for beddy-byes in a tiny cell on A Wing. What happens next? Everything and nothing. They order a takeaway. They go to the toilet. Charlie calls Daisy May’s collection of crystals “glorified gravel.” She tells him to stop farting. They tiptoe around like Shaggy (Charlie) and Scrappy-Doo (Daisy May); she emitting sporadic honks of alarm at the prospect of an appearance from a long-dead inmate; he patiently suggesting she “bring it down a notch” (you imagine this is something he’s been asking her to do, futilely, for decades).
They discuss the time Charlie and their dad chased a burglar down the street while wearing nothing but their pants. “It was back when Mum bought our underwear,” recalls Charlie. “F&F,” nods Daisy, sadly. “You know when the elastic’s completely gone?” continues Charlie. “They were just … loincloths. Flapping around.” They weep with laughter and Clive’s warnings of ghostly “knocks and whistling” fail to materialise.
It’s at 11.58pm, when Daisy May announces she “might put some fake tan on,” that the penny finally drops: this show isn’t about ghosts at all! Just as Mortimer & Whitehouse: Gone Fishing is more about the intimacy and ease of middle-aged friendship than the presence of carp, so NightWatch uses its “wooo, ghosts” hook as an excuse to spend time with the Coopers.
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There is an air of cobbled-togetherness to the series’ Skoda – here a tyre found round the back of Most Haunted; there an aerial pinched from the nearest celebrity travelogue – and there are points at which you wish that a little more care had been taken to conceal the joins. But really, that’s it, grumble-wise. What we have, in effect, is Gone Ghosting; a gloriously warm-hearted road trip in the company of two effortlessly hilarious buffoons. Parp-parp!
