The award-winning BBC sitcom Gavin and Stacey is about to return. Its creators tell Jasper Rees what inspired it...'When we met those girls on the train the other day they went, 'Oh yeah, what's that thing you did? Kevin and Tracey or something?'" Ruth Jones is sanguine about the impact of Gavin and Stacey. The comedy series, which Jones co-wrote and appeared in, about a whirlwind romance between a sweet Welsh girl from Barry and a nice Essex boy from Billericay, may recently have won two British Comedy awards and a South Bank Show award.
But the fact that it was shown on BBC3 meant that, after its first outing, most people didn't know Gavin and Stacey from Adam and Eve. "I kind of feel that the show doesn't exclude anyone," says Jones's co-writer James Corden, "and that people up and down the country could watch it." But then, as he ruefully admits: "A lot of them haven't." However, a week ago, Corden's dream of mass exposure came true.
To pave the way for the relaunch of BBC3, which the second series of Gavin and Stacey will be leading, BBC2 set aside three hours for the transmission of the entire first series. If you had the stamina, this was a stroke of scheduling genius. Swallowing the show in one chunk brought out flavours rarely tasted in half-hour comedy: a propulsive plot and a capacity to tug unmanipulatively at the heart strings. This comedy is also brave enough to field two main characters, winningly played by Matthew Horne and Joanna Page, who barely raise a laugh between them.
But Gavin and Stacey is immoderately funny too. The performers take a fair whack of the credit, not just Alison Steadman as Gavin's neurotic Essex mum with her bizarre Camilla fetish and Rob Brydon as Stacey's well-meaning and deeply closeted uncle, but also Corden and Jones as the central couple's amorously challenged best friends Nessa and Smithy. But it's their work as debutant writers that gives the cast the tools for the job. Jones, 41, was previously best known as Myfanwy, the lesbian barmaid in Little Britain's 'Only Gay in the Village' sketches. Corden, 27, has had his greatest success on stage and screen as one of the pupils in The History Boys.
The pair met in 2000 when cast in Fat Friends, the ITV drama set in and around a slimmers' club, and discovered a shared taste for The Royle Family, Cold Feet and Mike Leigh (Corden was in Leigh's film All or Nothing). "I remember thinking how talented he was for such a young person," says Jones.
During the third series of Fat Friends the idea for a comedy about a cross-border wedding was floated by Corden in the pub, based on the story of a friend who had to call a woman daily for work, started flirting and ended up marrying her. He was called Gavin. But Corden insists it was Jones who got it down on paper. "I would have completely forgotten about this but Ruth's determination just drove it through. I remember her going, 'We've got to write this down. We'll bang out this treatment and we'll send it off.'" The characters and back stories were fleshed out, and BBC3 commissioned a whole series straight off.
"We looked back on the treatment the other day," says Jones, "and it's not as warm; there's a lot of swearing in it, which we now don't have." It's the warmth that is captivating, that makes you care about the characters. That includes the pair played by the writers, whose generous proportions are unsparingly mined for both laughs and pathos.
Corden plays Smithy as a matey extrovert whose terror of women finds him tied by the apron strings to an unseen girlfriend who's just shy of 18. As Nessa, Jones has the distrustful carapace of the serially wounded sexual adventuress. Among her previous conquests Nessa lists John Prescott, Nigel Havers and two al-Fayeds (though she hasn't heard from the latter in a while).
Where Gavin and Stacey fall in love on their first date up in London, their sidekicks in the adjoining suite noisily and unknowingly put a bun in the oven. In the daringly unfunny final scene of the first series, she nearly tells him, then decides against it. The romance comes from Corden, who says he wanted to tap into "that vulnerability that guys have when they fall in love. There are many many times when you double-check yourself and think, as a man I shouldn't be driving for four hours just to kiss someone. And yet we all do it."
In the second series (which comes to BBC3 this month) Stacey goes to live with Gavin and his parents - look out for a painfully embarrassing breakfast scene with bedsprings squeaking rhythmically overhead - while Nessa's pregnancy needs to be resolved. There will also be a long-planned Christmas special. Beyond that, the writers are not sure. "We always wanted to see these characters at Christmas," says Jones. "But it would be a shame to find people saying, 'Oh God, they're playing the same note over and over again. You've got that problem with contriving the two worlds coming together. How long can you really convince people that that could happen?"
Corden likes the idea of writing a spin-off series starring Brydon as uncle Bryn. "There's like a whole world behind him. You hand this stuff over to an actor like Rob and it just gets better." As for other writing, together they're also adapting Cinderella as a modern-day musical adaptation for the BBC, while Jones has completed the first draft of a drama for BBC1 on her own and Corden is writing a sketch show with Horne, who was once part of stand-up duo Mat and Mackinnon.
And what of the original Gavin? What does he make of his friend's dramatisation of his courtship? "When I told him on the phone," says Corden, "at every point he'd go, 'Oh fuck off… Oh fuck off… Oh fuck off… I can't believe this!'" The reason Gavin and Stacey works is that everyone else can believe it.
Gavin and Stacey returns to British screens on BBC3, Sun March 16 at 9pm.
