Those Pesky Nicolaitans 1: It Matters

“Papa had permitted my nurse to glue St. Yitrudis’s pages together; the poor lady could not rest easy in our house until it was done. I never did get a look at the heretic. If I held the page up to the light I could just discern the shapes of both saints, blended together into one terrible monster saint.”

Rachel Hartman, Seraphina (2012)

The title of the intended series of posts of which this is the first is taken from a note I made in my bullet journal on the twenty-ninth of April this year.¹ Next to a list of the day’s planned activities and tasks, I wrote: ‘Still trying to figure out those pesky Nicolaitans’. And then I drew a box round it, just to reinforce the point.

 

You can bullet journal using a dotted notebook, but I prefer a squared one. And yes, I’m entirely aware that this doesn’t make a particularly relevant cover picture for the post as a whole, but I challenge you to think of something stock-photo-ish that does.

Indeed, the process of trying to figure out those pesky Nicolaitans has been taking up a frustratingly large proportion of my mental activity in recent weeks and months. The pesky Nicolaitans in question are a group mentioned twice in scripture; both instances are in Revelation, specifically the section of it that consists of letters, dictated by the Lord Jesus himself, to each of seven Christian communities in the Roman province of Asia Minor, that is, modern Turkey. To the church in Ephesus, he says: “Yet this you have: you hate the works of the Nicolaitans, which I also hate.” To the church in Pergamum, he says: “But I have a few things against you: you have some there who hold the teaching of Balaam, who taught Balak to put a stumbling block before the sons of Israel, so that they might eat food sacrificed to idols and practise sexual immorality. So also you have some who hold the teaching of the Nicolaitans. Therefore repent. If not, I will come to you soon and war against them with the sword of my mouth.”²

Right. So. The Nicolaitans are bad. Like, really bad. Jesus says he hates them; he commends those who do likewise, and he warns those who tolerate them to repent. Sit up and take notice, folks: it really matters that we determinedly reject the works and the teaching of the Nicolaitans. The really obvious question that needs answering off the back of that, though, is, well, what exactly was it that the Nicolaitans did and taught? Scripture says nothing more about them than what’s contained in the quotations above.

When I asked the associate minister of the church I belong to what he thought the doctrine of the Nicolaitans was, he – having smiled in an amused, ‘gosh-what-a-question’ sort of way – responded by checking my assent to the doctrine of the sufficiency of scripture. The idea was: since we can trust that God has revealed to us in scripture everything we need to know in order to live lives that glorify him, then we can trust that he has revealed to us in scripture everything we need to know about the Nicolaitans in order to live lives that glorify him. And the implication of that was: if scripture doesn’t give us any explicit details about the works and teaching of the Nicolaitans, that’s because it doesn’t matter that we know any.

You’ll probably have twigged, based on what I’ve already said in this post, that I wasn’t too satisfied with that as a response. Why would scripture even bother to mention them, let alone in such forcefully condemnatory terms, if it isn’t important for us to know about them? For whom are these verses intended, if not us? One is forced to conclude that the members of the relevant churches must have known who the Nicolaitans were when they received their letters, but that that knowledge mysteriously vanished from existence within decades of the book of Revelation beginning to circulate. Evidently, nobody thought it was knowledge worth retaining, even though they had been so vehemently warned against tolerating this jazz; and evidently, the Nicolaitan heresy was a very short-lived one indeed. The problem must have been dealt with so comprehensively right at the birth of the Church that it leaves not even a smudge in the historical record.

I say this because the earliest Christian writings we have extant don’t seem to have any real idea who the Nicolaitans were either. Oh, they talk as if they know who they were, but it’s a right mess, and not very convincing. Here’s a summary:

According to Irenaeus (c. 125-202CE³), in Against Heresies I.26.3, the Nicolaitans were followers of Nicolaus, one of the seven men appointed as deacons in Acts 6:1-5. (It’s true that Nicolaus and Nicolaitans are both derived from the same Greek words – so if a guy called Nicolaus did accrue a few disciples for himself, ‘Nicolaitans’ would have been an appropriate term for them – but Nicolaus is only mentioned that one time, so there are no other clues in scripture that the two might be related.) Irenaeus claims that the Nicolaitans lived lives of unrestrained indulgence. He also conflates their heresy with Balaam’s, as mentioned just beforehand in the letter to Pergamum, in terms of eating food offered to idols and sexual immorality. Elsewhere in the same work (III.11), Irenaeus states that the Nicolaitans’ heresy was the same as that of Cerinthus, who had some strange views about the nature of the Triune God, like that the Father is not the same as the Creator, and the Son is Jesus but not the Christ. In other words, Irenaeus isn’t even consistent with himself about what the Nicolaitans believed.

Tertullian (c. 150-225CE) weighs in on the subject too. Prescription Against Heretics 33 again conflates the Nicolaitan heresy with the teaching of Balaam, and adds that there is now another kind of Nicolaitans who subscribe to something called the Gaian heresy. What that is, is unclear (probably not helped by the fact that almost everybody and his dad was called Gaius in Roman times). In a similar vein, Against Marcion 29 says that the Nicolaitans commit sexual immorality. On Modesty 19 then indulges in even more conflation by stating that the Jezebel mentioned in Revelation’s letter to the church at Thyatira learned her error – again identified as sexual immorality and eating food sacrificed to idols – from the Nicolaitans.

Clement of Alexandria (c. 150-215CE), in Stromata III.4, agrees that the Nicolaitans committed sexual immorality, but tries to dissociate Nicolaus the deacon from this behaviour. Nicolaus, he says, was a fine, upstanding sort of chap, but his followers distorted what he said. This account of the matter is referred to by Eusebius (c. 275-339CE) in Church History (III.29); aside from pointing the reader to Clement, all he does is remark that the sect was short-lived.

According to the Catholic Encyclopaedia, other references in Epiphanius (c. 315-403CE), Theodoret (c. 393-458CE), and so forth, are taken straight out of Irenaeus, and so not worth looking at separately.⁴

So what have we got? Well, it strikes me that these guys are making exactly the kinds of claims about the Nicolaitans that they could be expected to make if they had no more information on the matter than we do. If you were trying to squeeze an explanation of what the Nicolaitans did and taught out of scripture, what might you do? Well, you might realise that Nicolaus the deacon had a cognate name, and try to pin the blame on him. Then again, you might not want to do that, because all we actually know about Nicolaus was that he was chosen for the ministry of sorting out the daily distribution for widows, on the grounds that he was a man of good repute, full of the Spirit and of wisdom – so you might infer that his followers must have corrupted his teachings. And as for the substance of what the Nicolaitans taught and did, you might easily decide that, given the lack of further explicit information, it must have been the same as Balaam’s error, as mentioned just beforehand.⁵ That’s an easy fix, right? (And you might as well chuck Jezebel in while you’re at it.) The trouble is that the text simply doesn’t allow for it. Even aside from the fact that there’d be no point in mentioning the thing by two different names, there’s a very clear also between Balaam and the Nicolaitans. You have some who hold the teaching of Balaam, and you also have some who hold the teaching of the Nicolaitans – two separate problems.

 

Balaam, of course, had a talking donkey long before Shrek made them cool.

So we can infer that the church fathers had no more concrete information about the Nicolaitans and their error than we do. (These peripheral mentions of Cerinthus and Gaius are both unique to one author who also affirms the same-as-Balaam’s-error theory, so they’re not worth giving any weight to.) No wonder Eusebius concluded that the sect was short-lived; it must have been, if there was no discernible remnant or record of it left less than a century after it had been busy causing trouble for at least two major churches (assuming that Revelation was written towards the end of the first century CE).

And yet Jesus bothered to say that he hates it. Twice. He didn’t see fit to mention any of the dozens of heresies that the Church would have to actively contend against over the next few centuries: denial of his humanity, denial of his divinity, and everything in between.⁶ He didn’t see fit to mention any of the dozens of heresies that the aforementioned church fathers dedicated time and treatises to dismantling. Yet, for some reason, this mysterious little sect that apparently disappeared without trace almost as soon as it emerged made the cut.

Unless the Nicolaitan heresy is actually something else altogether.

I do believe that we can trust that God has revealed to us in scripture everything we need to know in order to live lives that glorify him. It’s because I believe as much that I don’t buy that God would include in scripture such a strong warning against a heresy that apparently stopped being a problem, to the extent that nobody could remember what it even was, within mere decades after that warning was written down. Frankly, I think God has better things to put in his book than that. And if all scripture is useful for training in righteousness, so must this part of it be.

At this point, I feel I should confess that I have written this post sort of backwards. I didn’t stumble across the Nicolaitans during my personal Bible reading and determinedly set about trying to work out what they did and taught. On the contrary, I was introduced to a compelling explanation of what they did and taught that troubled me to the extent that I determinedly set about trying to work out whether I agreed with it. As you’ll gather, I have concluded that I do.

The explanation in question is as follows. Scripture does tell us what the Nicolaitans did and taught: the information is contained within the word. The Greek Νικολαΐτης (Nikolaïtēs), which is the word that comes out as ‘Nicolaitan’ in English translation, is derived from two other words: νικάω (nikáō), which means ‘conquer’, and λαός (laós), which means ‘people’, as in a collective people-group or nation. So the Nicolaitan heresy pertains to the conquering of a people. How so, given that, when Revelation was written, the Church was hardly going around defeating nations in war? How can the idea of conquering a people apply to an error of practice and doctrine going on within the body of Christ itself? Who is this people? Well, one sense in which the word λαός is used in the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible) is the people at large, as opposed to the priests (and sometimes the Levites too) – check out, for instance, Exodus 19:24, Hosea 4:9, Zechariah 7:5, 2 Chronicles 35:8, and Ezra 7:13 – the laity as opposed to the clergy, in other words, and indeed, λαός is precisely where we get the English term ‘laity’ from. The practice of the Nicolaitans is to conquer the laity – to set up an ecclesiastical elite, to grant some members of the body of Christ authority over the rest. The doctrine of the Nicolaitans is to claim divine approval for the same.

And Jesus hates it. And he calls those guilty of it to repent.

If it’s not apparent from this post why I was so troubled by all this, then I hope it will become so in the coming weeks as I unpack what I think the Bible says about how the Church should be run in more detail. At any rate, I hasten to assure you that I haven’t discarded an entire robust ecclesiology as a result of the above analysis of this one particular Greek word (as the associate minister seemed to think when I explained it to him – not altogether unreasonably, given the manner in which I’d launched the conversation). On the contrary, I was a good deal of the way to my current position on church governance well before I’d given any thought to what a Nicolaitan was; what the issue of the Nicolaitans did was convince me that it matters. It matters how the Church is run and it matters that I conduct myself in a manner that reflects how it ought to be run. It matters, adelphoi, that we hate the works and the teaching of the Nicolaitans, as our Lord does. This is our King and our Captain and our great High Priest talking; this is the one who willingly laid down his life in order that we might be reborn to a life of increasing love and knowledge of him, and increasing reflection of his likeness. He is the one who hates the works of the Nicolaitans, commends those who do likewise, and warns those who tolerate their doctrine to repent. Sit up and take notice, folks: this matters.

Footnotes

¹ Yes, I keep a bullet journal. I’m not going to say it’s revolutionised my life or anything, but I do think it’s a really good system, because it basically lets you build your own diary system, rather than relying on the stationery manufacturers to anticipate your needs. Some tips on getting started: http://bulletjournal.com/get-started/.

² Check it out: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=rev+2&version=ESVUK.

³ All dates in this section are as according to Theopedia, https://www.theopedia.com/, except Theodoret, who wasn’t on it, so I turned to the Encyclopaedia Britannica for him.

⁴ I consulted all these sources via the Catholic Encyclopaedia, so big thanks to those guys: http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/index.html. Any misrepresentation of the information on my part is, of course, completely my fault.

⁵ Do check out the story of Balaam as recorded in Numbers if you’re unfamiliar with it: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Numbers+22&version=ESVUK. Also, fun fact, there’s an inscription from Deir Alla that refers to a seer called Balaam son of Beor (coincidence? I think not), which is super interesting: http://www.livius.org/sources/content/deir-alla-inscription/.

⁶ Can we have a moment of appreciation for the fact that the Wikipedia page entitled ‘List of Christian heresies’, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Christian_heresies, is topped with the following statement: This list is incomplete; you can help by expanding it. Don’t encourage them, Wikipedia! There are enough heresies as it is!

Who Criticises Who

“You violated something more important than time: you bent the rules of life and death.”

Doctor Who S9 E4, ‘Before the Flood’ (2015)

Did you know that every single episode of Doctor Who produced since the 2005 relaunch is currently available on BBC iPlayer?¹ If not, well, look at that: now you have something better to do with the next little while than perusing my ramblings. You’re very welcome.

 

Look, ApocalypseCartoons at newgrounds.com has drawn an amazing picture of every single creature from the Moffat era! S/he has similar pictures for previous eras too; go and check them out: 

https://apocalypsecartoons.newgrounds.com/

I recently rewatched Toby Whithouse’s two-parter ‘Under the Lake’/‘Before the Flood’, easily the best story of Series Nine, and was struck afresh by the way it seems to be making some really, really scathing comments about the shortcomings of Moffat’s tenure as showrunner. Now, any of you who know me at all well will be familiar with my intense distaste for many of the trends exhibited by Doctor Who while Moffat has been at its helm. My sixth post on this blog, indeed, was devoted to criticism of three of those trends, which I characterised as Making Everything Ginormous, Writing the Female Companions Badly, and Messing Around with Death.² For this reason, I am completely willing to believe that my brain may simply be so well accustomed to criticising Moffat’s Who that it will see echoes of those same thought processes almost anywhere, and consequently that I may be reading all sorts of things into Toby Whithouse’s scripting that he didn’t intend to put there at all. On the other hand, he really does seem to be having a bit of a go. I’ll outline my case and you can see what you think.

‘Under the Lake’/‘Before the Flood’ is set in the twenty-second century, in an underwater base off the Scottish coast. Ever since the crew brought a mysterious (read: alien – this is Doctor Who after all) craft of some sort on board, the base has been haunted by what seem to be ghosts: insubstantial figures bearing the appearance of people known to be dead, which only come out when the base is in night mode, and make concerted efforts to add to their numbers when they do. Initially I gave a bit of a groan at the whole ghosts thing: I’d had enough of dead characters not really being dead after all, that being one of the key irritating hallmarks of the Moffat era. But the way the Doctor reacted to the ghosts – once he started entertaining the notion that they might genuinely be ghosts – caught me off guard in a most refreshing manner.

“So what have we got?” he begins to summarise. “Moran dies, and then those things appear. They can walk through walls, they only come out at night, and they’re sort of see-through.”

Clara interrupts: “Doctor, wait, you’re not saying –”

He interrupts her interruption: “They’re ghosts! Yeah, ghosts!”

“You said there was no such thing,” Clara reminds him. “You actually pooh-poohed the ghost theory.”

“Yes, well, well, there was no such thing as – as socks, or smartphones, and badgers, until there suddenly were,” rejoins the Doctor. “Besides, what else could they be? They’re not holograms, they’re not Flesh Avatars, they’re not Autons, they’re not digital copies bouncing around the Nethersphere. No, these people are literally, actually dead. Wow. This is – it’s amazing! I’ve never actually met a proper ghost.” A moment later he continues: “But don’t you see what this means? Death: it was the one thing that unified every single living creature in the universe, and now it’s gone. How can you just sit there? Don’t you want to go out there right now, wrestle them to the ground, and ask them questions until your throat falls out? What’s death like? Does it hurt? Do you still get hungry? Do you miss being alive? … OK, so they’ll try to kill you, blah, blah, blah. What does that matter? You come back. A bit murder-y, sure, but even so!”³

I remember feeling really quite disorientated by that little speech when I first saw the episode. Moffat’s Who had bombarded me with so many instances of people who were supposed to be dead turning out not to be properly dead after all that I’d become pretty much desensitised to it. Ghosts? Yeah, sure, whatever. Let’s all just shrug our shoulders and get on with the rest of the episode. What Whithouse does brings that whole assumption to a shuddering halt. Hang on a second, his scripting exclaims, this isn’t normal! Stop a moment; really look at what’s going on; think about it. Supposing you did find out that the dead came back to be among the living, wouldn’t the kind of awed fascination the Doctor describes – not an abstract curiosity, but a hunger to learn more, based on the understanding that this revelation matters intensely, possibly more than anything else does, for you personally – wouldn’t that be exactly the sort of reaction such a revelation would warrant? We’ve let ourselves get numb to this stuff under Moffat’s reign; Whithouse smacks us round the heads with the reminder that, in the normal run of things, there’s an absolute barrier between the living and the dead, which can only be crossed in one direction. Instead of using his not-actually-dead-after-all characters to make us forget that death is actually a big deal, he uses them to remind us of the fact.

Another thing he does here is make allusions to a selection of previous episodes. The Flesh Avatars featured in Series Six; the Autons showed up right back in the first episode of Series One; dead people hanging about in the Nethersphere constituted the background plotline of Series Eight, coming to the fore in the finale. One effect achieved by these allusions is a reinforcement of the events described as canonical. On one level, you might think I’d be none too happy with that, because that whole Nethersphere business was the absolute acme of Moffat messing around with death, and I disliked the whole premise of it very much indeed. Why legitimise that? However, the way that Whithouse uses all these allusions together actually sets itself squarely against Moffat’s way of doing things, because Moffat’s tendency has always been to dismiss previous canon. In his first series as head writer, he had the entire universe rebooted, making it explicitly clear that one effect of this was that certain events of former series never actually happened; Amy didn’t recognise the Daleks, for instance. He also overturned what could be considered the defining factor of relaunched Who as opposed to its predecessor, the destruction of Gallifrey and the Doctor’s uniqueness in the universe. (Granted, Russell T. Davies had made a couple of moves in that direction – most notably in ‘The End of Time’ – but to no lasting effect.) Whithouse, by contrast, puts all the events he describes on the same level: these things all happened, he indicates, not only the ones of them I like. It legitimises Moffat’s storylines, yes, but it delegitimises his approach to canonicity, which, of the two, presents the greater threat to the serial as a whole.

Furthermore, all the allusions made are held up as examples of not real living beyond death. The inhabitants of the Nethersphere, notably, are characterised as mere ‘digital copies’. Whithouse acknowledges the characters and possibilities Moffat has created as canon, but he doesn’t acknowledge them as having successfully torn down the barrier between the living and the dead.⁴

 

The ghosts no more demonstrate real life after death than this tasty-looking little guy.

Of course, at the time the Doctor made the above-quoted speech, he was mentioning these previous examples of flimsy, false life after death in contrast to the phenomenon he was currently encountering: at that stage he was entertaining, even advocating, the possibility that the ghosts on the underwater base really did achieve what none of the many and various undead entities of the Moffat era had. Later, however, that possibility is shot down. The Doctor figures out that what the ghosts are doing is beaming out a message – specifically, a set of coordinates – and that the reason they’re so murder-y is in order that there might be more ghosts doing the same, increasing the strength of the signal. “It could be [a distress call],” the Doctor says. “Or a warning. Might even be a call to arms. It could mean, come here, they’re vulnerable, help yourself. Wait a minute, though. Wait a minuet. Do you know what this means? It means that they’re not a natural phenomenon. It means that someone is deliberately getting people killed, hijacking their souls, and turning them into transmitters.” His disappointment and burgeoning anger here counterbalance his captivated excitement earlier. The ghosts are in the same category with the Flesh Avatars and the Autons and the digital copies bouncing around the Nethersphere: they fall short of real life after death. In the second instalment of the story, he refers to them as ‘electromagnetic projections’ a couple of times – a mundane and material term if there ever was one.

Thus Whithouse establishes firmly that the barrier between the living and the dead that we know from the real world is very much still in place in the Whoniverse too. Those Moffat storylines may have implied otherwise, but they fell short of achieving it. Death is still death.

That, perhaps, would be criticism enough of the way Moffat ran the show, but in actual fact, Whithouse goes even further. In ‘Before the Flood’, we are introduced to a character called Prentis, an undertaker from Tivoli, the most invaded planet in the galaxy. I would say that this in itself constitutes another nice bit of canon-acknowledging, since a different Tivolean showed up a couple of series ago in ‘The God Complex’, but Whithouse actually wrote that episode too, so maybe not. Still, if you want more acknowledgement of previous canon – and please do allow me to digress on this point for a moment – there’s more to be had: very early on in the episode, one of the crew of the underwater base, O’Donnell, mentions three of the Doctor’s previous companions: Rose, Martha, and Amy. She also remarks to him that, having travelled back to 1980, they are now “pre-Harold-Saxon, pre-the-Minister-of-War, pre-the-moon-exploding-and-a-big-bat-coming-out”. Once again, characters and events from the Davies and Moffat eras are treated as equally canonical – which perhaps, arguably, contradicts the resetting of the universe at the end of Series Five, but then again, it was never altogether clear which events that did and didn’t cover. I hated ‘Kill the Moon’, but the fact that its events are just part of the established past is somehow reassuring. If even the stupidest things in Who really happened, then everything really happened. The plotlines that occupy privileged positions in my heart and soul are safe from Moffat’s rampaging.

Anyway, to return to Prentis, back in 1980 our heroes encounter him alive, but he’s actually recognisable as the first of the ghosts they saw in the twenty-second century. Another crew member, Bennett, wants to save him from his impending doom, but the Doctor stops him: “You can’t cheat time. I just tried. You can’t just go back and cut off tragedy at the root, because you find yourself talking to someone you just saw dead on a slab – because then you really do see ghosts. We don’t tell him – understand? Not a word. We don’t have that right.”

We don’t have that right. Cheating time, messing around with death, is here coloured as morally unacceptable. Still, that’s only a hint: the killer blow is yet to come. Towards the end of the episode, the Doctor confronts the Fisher King, the one responsible for creating the ghosts: “You know, you’ve got a lot in common with the Tivoleans. You’ll both do anything to survive: they’ll surrender to anyone; you will hijack other people’s souls and turn them into electromagnetic projections. That will to endure, that refusal to ever cease, it’s extraordinary – and it makes a fellow think, because you know what? If all I have to do to survive is tweak the future a bit, what’s stopping me? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, the ripple effect: maybe it will mean that the universe will be ruled by cats or something in the future – but the way I see it, even a ghastly future is better than no future at all. You robbed those people of their deaths, made them nothing more than a message in a bottle. You violated something more important than time: you bent the rules of life and death. So I am putting things straight. Here, now, this is where your story ends.”

Bits of this, I feel, could almost be addressed directly to Moffat. That refusal to ever let his characters cease is extraordinary. He robs them of their deaths, makes them nothing more than digital copies bouncing around the Nethersphere, or whatever the favoured variant happens to be in any particular episode. Doctor Who thrives off mucking about with time – violating time is within its remit – but Moffat violated something more important than that when he bent the rules of life and death, again, and again, and again. Somebody has to put that straight. Whithouse takes up the challenge.

There’s a lot of mucking around with time in ‘Before the Flood’ – the entire premise of the episode is something called the Bootstrap Paradox – which I’d say constitutes Whithouse exhibiting what the programme is allowed to do. Violate time, fine, that’s just how we roll in the Whoniverse, but life and death matter too much for that sort of highjinks. Leave them be. You don’t have that right.

As I say, maybe I’m reading too much into Whithouse’s scripting, but he really does seem to me to be concertedly challenging two of the things I dislike so much about Moffat’s head-writer-ship: Messing Around with Death, and unceremonious dismissal of canon (a subcategory of Making Everything Ginormous). At any rate, even if you can’t see the outright criticism I’m suggesting is there, ‘Under the Lake’/‘Before the Flood’ is still, in itself, an absolute gem of a two-parter, which is guilty of none of my trio of complaints. On the contrary, it’s got everything a good Who story should: an interesting setting, a compelling mystery, some quite scary bits and a good deal of funny ones, a diverse cast of secondary characters that we’re made to really care about, lots of the Doctor being clever and a little bit of him being stupid, some engagement with moral questions (but no self-righteous preaching of a particular narrow worldview), a satisfying conclusion – need I go on?

And of course, it’s on iPlayer right now, so you can go and rewatch it right away – and see whether the scathing commentary I think I can see in it is at all apparent to you. Regardless, I do hope we’ll be seeing more of Whithouse’s scripting in upcoming series. Only a few months to wait for Series Eleven now…

Footnotes

¹ See, here they all are: https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/b006q2x0?suggid=b006q2x0. All 146 of them. Have fun.

² Under ‘2015’, then ‘September’, in the box on the right.

³ As usual, thanks to Chrissie’s Transcripts Site, http://www.chakoteya.net/DoctorWho/index.html, and NowMyWingsFit.

⁴ Funnily enough, what Whithouse is most famous for is having created Being Human, a serial which concerns itself with ‘the flotsam and jetsam of death’: vampires, werewolves, and yes, ghosts, plus the occasional zombie or succubus. It’s really good, especially Series One and Four, but I should warn you that there’s a lot of adult content (more than I’d be willing to put up with these days without skipping certain scenes). It’s another one you can get every episode of on iPlayer at the moment: https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/b00hqlc4?suggid=b00hqlc4.