James Corden: The big time

A suspicion that has been buzzing for a little while became an official fact this week: James Corden is the hottest property in British television, says Robert Hanks. Gavin and Stacey, the romantic sitcom that Corden and Ruth Jones created, wrote and star in, won the Audience Award at the Baftas – in effect, the prize for most-loved programme. It's an achievement that is especially remarkable given that the series goes out on the digital channel BBC3, where audiences are not large. And Corden himself scooped the award for Best Comedy Performance.

Since then, the BBC has announced that Corden and Mathew Horne, who plays Gavin, are to get their own series on BBC3 – described as "a traditional comedy entertainment show in the style of Morecambe and Wise", though that characterisation is somewhat undermined by the proposed title, Horne and Corden Have Come. Meanwhile, NBC has bought the rights to make a US version of Gavin and Stacey, signing up Corden and Jones as executive producers of the pilot. This is success on a Ricky Gervais scale – a comparison that has more point when you recall that it was NBC that made The Office a hit in America.

For those who haven't seen it – still the vast majority of the British public – Gavin and Stacey follows the romance between Gavin, from Billericay in Essex, and Stacey, from Barry Island in South Wales, who after six months flirting over the telephone at work meet, fall in love, and decide to get married. But there are complications, not least their best friends, Gavin's loud, childish sidekick Smithy, and Stacey's older, experienced – very experienced – mate Nessa, played by Corden and Jones respectively. Their anti-romance, involving mutual hostility and insults, several regrettable drunken flings, and, in the second series, Nessa's pregnancy, provides a slightly darker, funnier counterpoint to the predominantly optimistic tone of Gavin and Stacey's own relationship.

The show has two exceedingly rare qualities. The first is its fundamental sweetness – none of the cynicism, the need to épater les bourgeois that characterises so much modern comedy. Gavin and Stacey have their ups and downs: in the first series, the engagement barely survived Gavin's discovery that Stacey had been engaged five times before; in the second, the couple underwent a prolonged separation after Stacey, living in Billericay with Gavin's parents, began to feel that the cultural barriers between them were too big to overcome. But their love each other is never in doubt, and the most hardened viewer will end up rooting for them to make a go of things.

The other point is that, as Corden has noted, "everything I do is inspired by truth". Admittedly, this came moments after he had jokingly claimed, while presenting a film award to Keira Knightley in her absence, that he had been shagging the actress for the past three days: "Some of it sensual, sensual lovemaking, but on the whole quite brutal. Took me by surprise, quite dark, a lot of it." But others have backed him up.

Henry Normal, who with Steve Coogan runs the production company Baby Cow, recalls that when Corden and Jones first brought their script for Gavin and Stacey to him he was struck by "the working-class truth of what they were writing". Normal knows what he is talking about, having been co-writer of the first series of The Royle Family, which Corden has cited as a big influence, along with the film director Mike Leigh. (He appeared in Leigh's film All or Nothing in 2002.)

Normal is used to seeing scripts full of funny lines that could be said by anybody; with Gavin and Stacey, "every person there is a distinctive character. When you read it on the page, every character has a distinct way of talking. That's quite an art". So Stacey is always upbeat, always looking for the positive, even when sad; and Nessa has a whole idiolect, including her customary mobile-phone greeting "What's occurring?" (the closest the programme has to a catchphrase, and now a popular mobile ring-tone in its own right).

Nicholas Hytner, who directed Corden in the original stage production and subsequent film of Alan Bennett's The History Boys, saw the scripts for Gavin and Stacey quite early on. "I was expecting them to be good, because he is extraordinarily funny and clever, but I was bowled over by them. They were actually looking at the world and writing about it with a degree of humanity which is more or less extinct among those who adopt the current comedy formula."

Most writers for TV, theatre and film, he suggests, tend to recycle things they have already seen. "People who write a script, for instance, about a wedding, write about how weddings get written about in plays and films. You watch what James and Ruth wrote about a wedding, and you say, 'Oh my God, that's what weddings are like.'" This is percipient: the germ of Gavin and Stacey was an actual wedding Corden attended in Barry, and he and Jones were insistent that it should all be shot on location.

Corden's own background was unremarkable suburbia, in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire. He was by his own account a poor school student, quitting A-levels to act: it's interesting that he has typically been cast as a clever boy, playing a swot in the Channel 4 comedy Teachers, as well as one of the Oxbridge scholarship class in The History Boys. Given his obvious quickness and intelligence, his indifferent academic record probably says more about the English educational system than it does about him.

The two features of his childhood that stand out are his early and burning desire to act, and the utter sense of love and security bestowed on him by his parents: something he has spoken about in interviews, and of which Hytner has observed: "His mum and dad are lovely. On the odd occasion they appeared at the theatre or on set, you thought, 'Lucky old James.'"

This must account for his remarkable self-confidence – all the more remarkable given that he is, in his own words, a "chunky unit" in a business that generally adopts a narrow view of physical attractiveness. In his diary for 2004, Alan Bennett noted that Corden simply took charge of his own audition for The History Boys. That's also Hytner's recollection – "He blew in, he took over, he had the part within seven and a half seconds" – though at the time, there was barely a part to have. He ended up as Timms, the fat boy with a knack for telling teachers exactly what they want to hear, but with a sincerity that invites the suspicion that the piss is being taken; his most memorable scene had him role-playing as a prostitute in a French brothel, offering to show clients "ma prodigieuse poitrine", and showing an unnervingly feminine charm.

Confidence is what Lucy Lumsden, who as BBC comedy controller has commissioned the Horne and Corden series, noticed when she saw him in Cruise of the Gods, a one-off TV comedy from 2002, about actors from a long-defunct sci-fi programme reluctantly reunited on a fan cruise. Steve Coogan, Rob Brydon and David Walliams were the big-name stars, but Corden, playing Brydon's son, managed to register his presence. "For somebody so young, he has such impact on screen, and such obvious confidence – that's something you don't forget easily." (This was a key moment in Corden's career: not only did Coogan's company go on to produce Gavin and Stacey, but also Brydon plays the key role of Stacey's repressed uncle Bryn.)

The confidence is obvious, too, in his increasingly frequent appearances at awards ceremonies and chat shows: as when, in March this year, he appeared on Lily Allen's BBC3 show and proceeded to flirt outrageously, telling her, "I don't think you realise how lovely you are." They have since been spotted about town together, and despite Corden's insistence that they are just good friends, the outlets that pay attention to this sort of thing have begun to take it for granted that they are an item.

This new presence on the gossip pages is merely the latest instalment in Corden's elevation to "sex god", as he proclaimed himself at the Baftas. Messages are exchanged on websites about his relationship status – until recently he was dating Sheridan Smith, who plays Smithy's sister in Gavin and Stacey – his lovely blue eyes, sense of humour, and other attributes. The appeal cuts across gender divides: an American gay website called chubarama.net has taken to referring to Corden as "my future husband". Corden himself seems to revel in a touch of sexual ambiguity: presenting a theatre award to Daniel "Harry Potter" Radcliffe earlier this year, he seized the actor and subjected him to a long, intense-looking kiss. (Corden denied afterwards that tongues were involved.)

There is one other aspect of Corden's character that deserves comment, and that helps to account for his success: he sticks by his friends. People like to work with him again. His first role, at the age of 20, was in Kay Mellor's weight-watchers comedy-drama Fat Friends; from that came his friendship with Jones (to whom he paid tribute in a genuinely touching acceptance speech at the Baftas), as well as Alison Steadman, who plays Stacey's mother. After a couple of years of touring as well as the film, half the cast of The History Boys ended up in Gavin and Stacey.

Hytner says: "He's phenomenally good company. Hysterically funny to be with, and doesn't give a shit. When the mighty Hollywood executives came to visit us [during filming of The History Boys] and took us out to dinner, all James wanted to tell him was what crap he'd been responsible for for the past 10 years: 'You can't actually have thought that was good when you were making it.' And somehow got away with it." Could I point out, Hytner asks, that he would love to have Corden back at the National Theatre: as actor or playwright, he doesn't specify. Either way, it would be worth seeing.