Gavin & Stacey's success is 'a lesson in patience’

James Corden and Ruth Jones speak at preview screening

James Corden says the success of Gavin & Stacey has been ‘a lesson in patience’ in a media landscape obsessed with speed and the next big thing.

He and co-star and co-creator Ruth Jones introduced a screening of the last-ever episode yesterday in front of a specially invited audience of journalists - including Chortle - and people who had worked on the show.

Those attending had to sign non-disclosure agreements to ensure none of the storylines from the show leak out before it airs on Christmas Day.

On stage, Corden reflected on how the comedy grew from a relatively modest BBC Three series, seen by about a million people in 2007, to a national treasure. The last Christmas special, in 2019, attracted almost 18.5million viewers.

Asked about its success, the comedian said: ’The more I've thought about it, I wonder if it's a lesson in patience,.

‘Particularly in television or in the way that we consume stuff… we talk about speed, and we've decided that speed is the single most important thing in everything that you can do. I ordered it then, and it arrived then. And you get young people now watching things at twice the speed that it was ever meant to be formatted at. You’re told speed is important.

‘But here's a show that ended 15 years ago, waited 10 years to tell another hour of the story and waited five more years to end it.

‘And actually, maybe, the lesson for all of us, for people that write about television, for people that talk about television, for people that write television, is maybe time and patience and care might be the answer for things to have a longevity outside of what we consume on our phones.’

Elsewhere in the session in a swanky London hotel, a slightly emotional Jones told the audience that that they didn’t have a clear idea of what form the series would take when they started writing it.

She said: ‘I don't think we knew really what the show was when we wrote the very first episode. We knew where we were going, like in terms of the narrative that we were going to end episode six with a wedding, but I don't think we really knew who the characters were. We got to know them as we went along.

‘I think what has remained throughout all of the episodes is this sense of love – I'm gonna cry now – love between friends, love between family members, conventional boy-meets-girl love stories and unconventional relationships.

‘So I think that's kind of remained the same, and the lack of cynicism has remained the same, Basically all the people in all the characters in the show really do love each other. Call it boring, but they do.’

Corden, who plays Smithy, agreed, saying: ‘ It doesn't really feel like we're in charge of writing it. I feel like we just have to be together, and we open a portal, and the characters arrive, and they tell us what they want everybody to know.’

He also concurred that they never had any long-term plans for the show, explaining: ‘We have never, ever thought past what we've been commissioned to do. When we were writing the scripts for the first series, we didn't know if the show would get greenlit.

‘Then it gets green lit, then you shoot it, and then you're hoping that someone finds it. Then you get to do another series. And then suddenly, as that one starts coming out, it feels like lots of people are watching it.

‘And then we did the first Christmas special [in 2008] which was just a dream come true for us – an absolute dream come true to have a show that was considered worthy of a of a Christmas special, and that was enough for us.’

He said after the third series ended on New Year’s Day 2010 ‘were definite that that was it’ because ‘we were finding it hard to construct ways for the families to keep meeting up’ saying that was when the show was at its most fertile.

The BBC’s chief content officer Charlotte Moore said it was ‘one of the most exciting moments’ of her career wen she got a call from Corden one night in 2018 about the last Christmas special.

She explained: ‘ I was literally in my bedroom about to go to bed, and the phone goes. He goes, "Charlotte., would you be interested in reading a new Gavin and Stacey script that me and Ruth have just written?" And would I be interested?

‘I don't think I said anything. I just gasped.

‘And when the text came out of the blue a year ago, a very kind of humble James tech saying "would it be possible if confidentially, you could come to the Soho Hotel to meet with Ruth Jones and I, we just got something we want to talk to you about…"

‘Well, obviously I didn't want to presume, but I literally had butterflies.’

And she said of the final episode, to air at 9pm on Christmas Day: ‘They’ve created something truly magical that fans will treasure forever, and we at the BBC will treasure forever too.’

• Gavin & Stacey: The Finale will air at 9pm on Christmas Day and the behind-the-scenes documentary Gavin & Stacey: A Fond Farewell will air at 7pm on New Year’s Day, both on BBC One and iPlayer.

Gavin and Stacey final episode