GAVIN and Stacey’s original name has been revealed – as James Corden admitted the show was almost ditched five years before the final episode.
Fans of the BBC comedy were treated to an epic festive episode on Christmas Day, which saw Smithy and Nessa finally get together and tie the knot before it officially came to an end.
Tonight, viewers got the chance to spend one final evening with their favourite characters – and the actors who played them – in a special documentary called Gavin & Stacey: A Fond Farewell.
It featured archive footage right from the beginning of the show in May 2007, right up until the last episode, as well as contributions from the cast.
Creators Ruth Jones and James Corden spoke about how they came up with the original idea after James attended a wedding in Wales, but with a different name.
Ruth recalled: “I said let’s write this treatment so we can send it off, it was called It’s My Day, it literally was just about the wedding with lots of these little vignettes.
James added: “We also wrote, really just for us, a backstory for of who they were.”
Ruth then said: “And we sent it to Stuart Murphy who was the controller of BBC Three and he really liked it but he said ‘there’s no place, there’s no slot for a one hour comedy drama on BBC Three, but why can’t you serialise the backstory?'”
The rest, as they say, was history and Gavin and Stacey went on to be a huge success on the channel before moving to BBC One for its Christmas Special when it returned in 2019.
However, James and Ruth revealed in the documentary that the festive episode almost never happened after they struggled to write the script for it initially.
James recalled: “The 2019 special, I don’t know if people know this, but we gave up on it at one point.
“We’d written maybe half way through and we read it and we were like ‘this is rubbish, this is awful, it’s terrible’.
“Like it’s extraordinary how close we were to just…I actually remember saying to each other ‘well thank god we didn’t call the BBC’.”
He continued: “So we ate dinner in my kitchen and I said ‘Look, I think we probably owe it to the show to go back in and talk about why it’s bad and say goodbye to it really.’
“We were like two hours from saying goodbye to it and we can never do it again because it isn’t very good.”
Ruth added: “But then we realised – which is true for every episode of Gavin and Stacey – that the reason these people are together is because of Gavin and Stacey, so we realised that the reason it wasn’t working is because there wasn’t anything substantial for them.”
James concluded: “And then that night at 11pm is when we came up with the scene of Stacey keeping hold of the matches and it changed everything.”
With the news that the show is set to make an exciting return to screens, let's take a look at some of the comedy programme's biggest and best moments...
Gavin and Stacey: A Fond Farewell is available on BBC iPlayer.
