James Corden has admitted he wanted to “trick everybody” with the plotline for Gavin and Stacey’s eagerly awaited finale.
The hit BBC sitcom originally aired between 2007 and 2010, and returned in 2019 with a one-off festive special that ended on a cliffhanger when Ruth Jones’s character Nessa proposed to James Corden’s Smithy.
*Spoilers ahead*
In the finale, which aired tonight (25 December), fans were left completely shocked when it turned out that Smithy had spent most of the episode preparing for a wedding with one of the show’s most disliked characters.
Sonia, played by Laura Aikman, returned for the one-off episode in an unexpected turn of events as she prepared to marry Smithy. The pair had broken up in the 2019 Christmas special after Sonia left Barry Island early and Smithy turned down her invitation to join.
At the wedding, Gavin, played by Mathew Horne, stands up to tell his friend Smithy that he is making a mistake. Nessa, meanwhile, is unable to attend the wedding as she’s on her way to Southampton to work on the boats.
In a dramatic turn of events, everyone rushes to stop Nessa leaving, as Smithy finally declares his love and gets down on one knee to propose. She says yes and the couple have an informal wedding in which the bride, true to her alternative nature, wears black.
“I remember it so vividly because I was in America at this point and I called Ruth, in this sort of, ‘Will we do it? Won’t we do it? Should we do it? Shall we do it?’” Corden told a panel at a screening of the finale in London, when asked about the “bait and switch” storyline.
“I had this idea at like three o’clock in the morning and I called Ruth and I was like, I wonder if we could trick everybody into thinking that for the first six or seven minutes they’re just going to watch a wedding between Sonia and Smithy.”
He explained that fan theories had prompted the storyline, “because what was really interesting is after the 2019 special, all that people would say to us was, ‘What does he say?’ They would never say ‘Who did he choose?’ I don’t even think it was in people’s peripheral. These two have been up and down.”
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He shared Jones’s reaction as he said: “I remember calling Ruth on my drive into work and saying, ‘I wonder if we could do this’, and the way that writing the show works is I’ll just keep going to Ruth. I’m like a sort of excitable energizer bunny going, ‘What if?’ And Ruth goes, ‘Nah,’ I go, ‘What if?’ And then as soon as she goes, ‘Oh, yeah,’ I know that it’s great.”