James Corden was in brutally honest mood this afternoon as he reflected on his least favorite Gavin & Stacey episode at the BBC Comedy Festival.
“It’s a very very very bad half hour,” he said of Season 1 Episode 2 of his beloved BBC sitcom. “It’s an awful episode.”
So why is Corden so damning?
He said he and co-creator Ruth Jones “backed ourselves into a corner” by making Gavin propose to Stacey at the end of Episode 1.
“It had this very romantic end, so you can’t do another romantic proposal [in the next one],” he explained.
Episode 2 of the first series sees a huge misunderstanding on the phone cause Gavin to have to drive to Wales to resolve his relationship. At that point in their earlier careers, Corden and Jones didn’t realize Gavin & Stacey was “not a sitcom but closer to a comedy drama,” he said. “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 added. “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.”
Speaking alongside Corden, Jones joked that there is “very little Nessa” in Season 1 Episode 2, hence the failure.
The only saving grace of the ep, Corden added, was that iconic characters Dawn and Pete, played by Julia Davies and Adrian Scarborough, were introduced. Corden said today the pair were possibly their greatest creation, along with Pam, played by Alison Steadman.
Corden used his Comedy Festival appearance to argue passionately for comedy commissioners to take bigger risks on shows and greenlight double-season orders.
“How do platforms today crack comedy?,” he questioned. “I feel like the only way is to commission two series and say, ‘We believe in this and it’s going to take time and you can’t rely on overnight ratings’. There is an element of ownership and discovery to comedy that we the audience want to find comedies and share them with our friends.”
Gavin & Stacey was given a double-season order before it had premiered but Corden questioned whether this would happen in today’s climate. “They said it doesn’t matter how many people watch this, we believe in it and want to commission it again,” he said of the BBC. “Commissioners have to treat comedy in a different way. It can create stars overnight but audiences need time and don’t want to be force fed.”
You also need a fair bit of luck, Corden added. “If [Gavin & Stacey] came six months earlier or later there’s a chance it doesn’t work,” he said. “We are so programmed to think about success but success is about timing, mood, culture, and there is such an element of luck in it.”
Gavin & Stacey‘s finale was 2024’s most-watched TV show in the UK, concluding on Christmas day to an eventual audience of more than 20 million people.
Corden and Jones have since swapped the BBC for Apple TV with The Choir, which rolls cameras this year and sees them star as brother and sister Ben and Lisa, reunited after Ben returns home from abroad to a quiet English town.
The pair were speaking at the BBC Comedy Festival just after top British comedy commissioners and before the writers of Amandaland.
