James Corden offered his unsparing verdict of one particular Gavin & Stacey episode, branding the instalment “awful”, and “very, very, very bad”.
The British actor and chat show host, who co-created and starred in the hit sitcom alongside Ruth Jones, gave his thoughts during an appearance at the BBC Comedy Festival last week.
Gavin & Stacey ran for 22 episodes on the BBC between 2007 and 2024, including three Christmas specials. Corden had issues, however, with the second entry in the first series, which followed on from Gavin’s (Mathew Horne) confession of love to Stacey (Joanna Page) at the end of the series premiere.
“It’s a very very very bad half hour,” he said, per Deadline. “It’s an awful episode.”
Corden claimed that the problem stemmed from the writers “back[ing] ourselves into a corner” with the conclusion of episode one. Episode two sees a phone mix-up lead to Gavin taking a road trip to Wales, and ends with Horne’s character making a marriage proposal.
“[The first episode] had this very romantic end, so you can’t do another romantic proposal [in the next one],” Corden said.
He explained that he and Jones were still experimenting with the tone of the series, and had yet to realise that Gavin & Stacey was “not a sitcom but closer to a comedy drama”.
“We were conscious of this half-hour comedy thing and I don’t think we trusted that actually the characters will be the thing that will be funny,” he said. “We tried to instead say we needed something funny in the scenes so we had Gavin jump the barriers when proposing, and be covered in lasers.
“In our head we were making a sitcom but we weren’t, we were making a character-driven story.”
Gavin & Stacey’s initial run last from 2007 to 2010, and encompassed three series and a Christmas special.
It later returned for another Christmas special in 2019, and a final one in 2024.
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Last year, the BBC revealed that the 2024 Christmas episode had become the UK’s most-watched scripted show across all broadcasters and streamers since records began in 2002.
On Christmas Day, the episode attracted 12.3 million viewers, a number that grew to over 20 million in the month after it aired.
