Jim Howick

Pat Butcher stands in a corridor of Button House in a scoutmaster's uniform with an arrow through his neck, and he is the most contented person in the building. That is the Jim Howick part in one image. The arrow is the joke; the good cheer is the performance. Howick plays him as a man who has been dead for decades and has decided to be pleasant about it, and Will Hanke shoots him in plain daylight, so there is no fog to hide behind. We laughed at the arrow, and a minute or so later we noticed we were sorry for him, and that delay is how the whole show works.

He came up through sketch comedy, including The Armstrong and Miller Show, and found his people on Horrible Histories in 2009: Mathew Baynton, Simon Farnaby, Martha Howe-Douglas, Laurence Rickard and Ben Willbond, the group that later called itself Them There. They have scarcely been apart since. Yonderland (2013–2016) stretched the sketch manner into a fantasy story for families, Bill (2015) took it to the cinema and to Shakespeare's youth, and Ghosts (2019–2023) ran for five series and is the one that will last. Howick's name is on the writing as well as the cast list for all three, and with a collective this close it is hard to say which lines are his. That is rather the point of a collective.

What we can say is what he brings as a performer, which is the affable man slightly out of his depth. Historical comedy is usually cruel and Horrible Histories is not, or not quite; Howick's own line is that the group's view of history is "naughty, but completely factual", and that mixture of mischief and care runs through everything he has done since. In Ghosts it becomes a comedy about grief that talks about death plainly without going solemn, and our review found the series far better built than its silliness suggests. Lucy Williams's costume tells you who Pat is before he opens his mouth, and Howick spends five series confirming it while letting the sadness show at the edges.

The limits are real. Pat is close kin to the men Howick played in the sketches, and the group's style is so much its own thing that a plot can drift without much damage; the hotel storyline in Ghosts goes nowhere, and our review said it hardly mattered. When he stepped outside the circle for Broadchurch (2017), some viewers were startled to see him in anything dark, which says more about how firmly he is fixed in their minds as the scout leader than about the acting. He has since turned up in Sex Education (2019) as Colin Hendricks and in Here We Go, ensemble work again. The interesting question is what he does when the other five are not beside him. On the evidence so far, he is in no hurry to find out.