Gavin & Stacey stars Ruth Jones and James Corden on creating a ...
TV
Speaking only to Big Issue, Ruth Jones and James Corden reveal how they're bringing nearly 20 years of finding comedy joy in the everyday to an end
Ruth Jones and James Corden are giddy with excitement when they arrive to talk with Big Issue. We are in St Katharine Docks, London, where they’re midway through the edit for the 90-minute Gavin & Stacey finale – the centrepiece of BBC One’s Christmas Day schedule and the culmination of a 20-year collaboration.
The first episode of Gavin & Stacey since the 2019 festive special ended a 10-year hiatus will also be its final farewell. It’s a massive cultural moment. In 2019, 18.5 million of us tuned in (more than 10 times the number of tickets sold for another comeback – the Oasis reunion tour), only to be left on a massive cliffhanger as Nessa (Jones) got down on one knee to propose to Smithy (Corden).
Not bad for a show conceived in a hotel bar in Leeds by two actors from ITV’s Fat Friends.
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At a time when other TV comedies were hellbent on being cool and cynical, Gavin & Stacey was always warm and open-hearted. After taking its first steps on the fertile fields of BBC Three in May 2007, Gavin & Stacey grew into one of the biggest shows this century.
The deceptively simple culture-clash comedy, as two sets of families and friends come together around the romance between Essex boy Gavin Shipman (Mathew Horne) and Barry’s Stacey West (Joanna Page), was built on love and community. And its foundation is the bond between creators Jones and Corden.
Since Gavin & Stacey made it big, Jones, 58, has created hit Sky series Stella and written three bestselling novels, while Corden, 46, found global fame hosting The Late Late Show in the US – where his Carpool Karaoke with Harry Styles, Elton John, Mariah Carey and a special with Paul McCartney became huge hits. We asked them about their journey – and how they’ve changed along the way.
Ruth Jones: How have we changed? Well, we’ve obviously both lost a lot of weight…
James Corden: Ha! I think we’re probably both calmer than we were – and I actually think we’re both a lot more professional.
RJ: Sorry, hahaha, I’m just laughing at you being serious.
JC: As I say, we’re very professional!
RJ: We went in very different directions after series three finished. Not because there was any schism – I was in Wales doing Stella, James was doing One Man, Two Guvnors and then went over to America. So there was a period where we were not as in touch. Because it was intense when we were writing the first few series. On series one we were finding out what it was all about.
JC: Then the whirlwind of series two and three, which changed everything.
RJ: But when we got back together around the time of your 40th, we realised our friendship was really strong.
JC: My wife organised a surprise birthday party for me in Mexico. Lots of my friends walked in with a mariachi band playing. Then my wife said, there’s one more person here. Ruth walked into the room and I just burst into tears. I couldn’t believe she was there. It was so special.
RJ: It was amazing.
JC: We were there for a few days, went for dinner, and Ruth got up and sang Wild Thing with the band. She sang it at her own wedding, and I’d always said I wish I could have been there. She was properly grinding, it was amazing. So filthy. It’s that strange thing, isn’t it? If you haven’t seen someone for a while and they walk in, you’re suddenly aware of what you mean to each other. I can’t tell you how we’ve changed. But I know we have changed a lot.
RJ: We are kinder to each other now. We’ve grown up a bit.
JC: I can only speak for myself, but I treasure our friendship more today than I ever have. And I value it even more than the show.
Barry Island? Over my dead bodyRJ: It all started after James had been to a wedding in Barry where the bride was Welsh and the groom was English. And you sat there, didn’t you, and saw these two families coming together?
JC: I didn’t know many people. So I was on my own, just watching it take place and these two worlds collide. I came back, do you remember, and said, Ruth, I don’t know if anyone’s shown a wedding on TV where nothing really happens yet everything’s happening. All of life is here.
RJ: We were filming Fat Friends in Leeds and it was so weird for me to hear you talking about Barry, which is the next resort from where I grew up in Porthcawl. We used to go to Butlin’s there with my grandmother.
JC: But it was also weird because we were in the Crowne Plaza in Leeds and at any point you could go to this mezzanine floor and someone from Fat Friends would be there. But for some reason it was just us two that night. If another member of the cast had popped out for a club sandwich, we’d never have talked about it.
RJ: How old were you? About 21? But your imagination was always firing. You were always coming up with ideas – it was a case of whether you would act upon it.
JC: Which was never.
RJ: But you always had these spectacular ideas. After that we’d sit watching people in the hotel, thinking, if this was the wedding reception, she’d be the dragon aunt andhe’s the geeky uncle with his new digital camera.
JC: Yes! Ruth had written a couple of TV things and certainly knew how to switch a laptop on better than I could. And she kept going, ‘You should write this.’
Truth be told, everything is fascinatingJC: It wasn’t Gavin & Stacey yet. It was a one-off special called It’s My Day. We wrote a backstory, just for us, so we’d know who the people were and how they all met. At that point, you were going to be the bride and I was the best man called Kyle! Didn’t they end up sleeping together down an alley?
RJ: Or was it being sick?
JC: Later, we were going on Richard & Judy, and we met up in London to finish it. At the last minute, I vividly remember Ruth said we should put the backstory in, going, what harm can it do?
RJ: We knew Stuart Murphy, then head of BBC Three, because of Little Britain. We’ve still got the email where he said he loved it but there was no room for one-off comedy drama, so why not serialise the backstory and end with the wedding. I don’t think we knew what the show was yet – but we knew what it wasn’t.
JC: The weirdest thing about ending Gavin & Stacey now is that, for the first time, we actually know what it is. One thing we always used to say was, oh, that feels too much like a sitcom joke. Punchline, ba-boom! Our original thing was that everything is fascinating. So Pete needing a new pair of oven gloves is fascinating. A group of people ordering a curry is fascinating.
RJ: We knew Alison Steadman from Fat Friends. We always thought of her as playing the mother. And we both knew Rob Brydon. James had worked with him on Cruise of the Gods.
JC: And Ruth had gone to school with him. Actors love playing dress-up and messing around. It was a very small show, there was certainly not the budget to pay a Rob Brydon or Alison Steadman – our thought was if we write parts that were fun enough, they’d come on board. And if they came on board, it would legitimise the whole thing.
RJ: This wasn’t a high production values show. It was a small budget, and it needed to go on the actors.
JC: You’re just trying to get it greenlit. We knew, as actors, if you get a call from your agent saying, I’ve got you an audition for a new BBC Three show from two unknown writers you’d be like, meh. But if it has Alison and Rob attached, oh, shit, that’s a real show. Also, when you’re doing something for the first time, you want friends around who will forgive the mistakes you’re inevitably going to make. We used to split the week – two nights in Wales, two nights in England. You’d stay on my sofa bed and we’d write in our kitchens. I remember staying at Ruth’s and we were watching Love Actually, and Ruth goes, she’d be a really good Stacey, that Joanna Page. Another night, The Catherine Tate Show was on and you said again: he’d be a really good Gavin. I was like, oh, he really would.
RJ: All the way through there are characters we never thought we’d see again. Actors like Julia Davis and Adrian Scarborough are amazing. I could watch them as Dawn and Pete all day. You want as much as you can of them but you would never really get them down to Barry.
JC: That’s why they are only in one scene in the 2019 special. You have to play by the rules you set.
RJ: And Dave Coaches was only supposed to be in one episode, driving Stacey and Nessa to London. But Steffan Rhodri is too good.
JC: Remember the readthrough for the first series? Rob was away so Steffan read all the Uncle Bryn parts. And he was so good. Rob has come to every readthrough since. But he was also so good we had to get him back somehow.
JC: Making Gavin & Stacey has always been this experience that starts with just two friends in a room, with a pack of Post-it notes and a laptop. Who types when we’re writing together? Who do you think?
RJ: One thing James always does when I’m typing it up is sing. He’s got a beautiful voice. I love to hear James sing. But not when I’m typing. But we do play a lot.
JC: When people say, what’s gonna happen to Nessa and Smithy? I’d always say, I’m as excited to find out as you are. It feels like we just sit and open a portal and the characters arrive and tell us what they’re up to. We are just in charge of writing it down.
RJ: There are a few important ingredients to a writing day. Chocolate, sweets and naps. A snooze is really important.
JC: You have to allow space for things to organically arrive, you know? We have only had maybe two disastrous writing days.
RJ: Remember when we had a row, then we bought two big Easter eggs. We had a sugar high, went to sleep, woke up and wrote Pete and Dawn renewing their vows.
JC: I was lying on the floor and went, what if she goes: “Pete, the two of us need look no more. We’ve both found what we were looking for.” And we both started laughing. The idea is so lazy, to remove the word Ben from the song and replace it with Pete. I guess the lesson is you have to stay in the room.
RJ: The other disaster was the Christmas special in 2019. Nobody knew we were writing it. We hadn’t mentioned it to the BBC or anybody except our other halves.
JC: We’d written 45 pages and it was bad. It was just crap. We ate dinner, the four of us in my kitchen, and were down but also relieved. At least we’d found out it just wasn’t there any more. I remember saying we owed it to our characters to find out why it wasn’t working.
RJ: And we realised the show is called Gavin & Stacey. They are the heart of it and it didn’t have anything substantial for them yet. So we realised we had to look at how they were keeping things alive in their relationship.
RJ: We’re both fortunate to grow up with pretty stable families. James mentioned friends he’s known since he was little, I’m still in touch with my closest friends from home. Those things ground you. And also make you appreciate, with so much crap going on the world, it’s nice to have a bit of joy.
JC: If you live your life on social media, you would think the entire world is full of cynicism and conflict. But we just don’t see it that way. I don’t think we’re capable of writing something cynical.
RJ: We really do love watching people and the way they interact. The simplest things are just joyous.
JC: We love the quirks and foibles of people. Everyone is fascinating. What’s interesting about our show – and it’s something I’m very proud of – is, take Smithy and Nessa, right? In any other British show or film, Smithy is the guy who delivers a TV to Hugh Grant and Nessa is the quirky bartender Julia Roberts asks for a drink.
RJ: But these people never cease to amaze me.
JC: Yes. And if you only watch TV and movies, you are told all the time that people like Nessa and Smithy don’t fall in love. They’re not interesting. And they certainly don’t have, like, phenomenal sex. But I think we can all agree that one thing we do know about Smithy and Nessa is that it’s a great time when they get in the sack!
‘Last Christmas is woven in the fabric of Christmas’: Celebrating 40 years of Wham!’s festive classic Ghosts Christmas special: ‘It’s a warm show, and it’s an open-minded show’ James Corden interview (2015): ‘It is insane that this is my life’ Ruth Jones interview (2019): ‘The 2019 Gavin & Stacey Christmas Special is 100% Brexit free!’ Oh my Christ(mas)RJ: This finale might not be what you are expecting.
JC: What people are going to see on Christmas Day is the culmination of a 20-year love story, which hopefully shows, if nothing else, that love is complicated and messy and for everyone.
RJ: It’s a 20-year chunk of life too – for us and these characters. Larry Lamb [who plays Gavin’s dad Mick] said, “When I started this job I was in my 50s, now I’m pushing 80.” That really got to me. It’s special, if you’ve got long-term friendships, to be able to say as you get older, remember when we did that? And it’s lovely to be able to say that with this show.
JC: This show changed all our lives. Sometimes you’re in something good and no one sees it. Sometimes you’re in something bad and everyone sees it. And here’s Gavin & Stacey, this precious thing in the middle of our lives. It was 20 years ago we were writing it. What are the chances? We feel incredibly lucky.
RJ: And I guarantee we will definitely not be coming back.
JC: This is the end. It’s impossible to come back. Most people ruin the last episode. But we knew how it would end. It’s so joyful. The whole show has been about joy. Joy has been the currency of the whole show. And I hope people feel, oh, what a joy to watch these characters’ lives for that long.
Gavin & Stacey airs at 9pm on Christmas Day on BBC One and iPlayer.
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