Is this really the end for Gavin & Stacey? "I would love to come back every year"

If you’re among the millions to have watched every episode, then you will have also seen the grand sum of my filmography as a television actor. In the sixth episode of the second series, there is a typically silly B-plot scene involving Pam Shipman (Alison Steadman) leading local opposition to a new phone mast.

Thanks to a long story (related to a former career as a men’s magazine journalist), I can be seen as an extra, in an oddly prominent role as one of the two phone company operatives who trudge through Pam’s glowering crowd of protestors in order to hammer a sign into the ground. It is, over and above my subsequent career as a regular food critic on shows like MasterChef, the thing I still get the most excited messages about.

And the fact that I’m a very small part of one of the modern era’s most beloved British sitcoms is a completely ridiculous, frequently wheeled-out claim to fame.

Following 2019’s Yuletide reunion special, hotly anticipated answers relating to rumoured funerals, Uncle Bryn and Jason’s infamous fishing trip, and Smithy’s response to Nessa’s cliffhanger marriage proposal are mere days away. So, naturally, the first thing I want to ask Mat Horne and Joanna Page – both returning as the titular star-crossed lovers – is why I didn’t get the call to reprise my pivotal role.

“Oh no, is this going to be a really bitter piece now?” says Horne, with a chuckle. “It was nothing to do with your performance, Jimi. There was actually a big chat about it. But we just wanted to leave the audience with something that wasn’t concluded.”

In all seriousness, Jones and Corden’s apparent willingness to leave their audience dangling has been the central conundrum of the past five years. From the moment the credits rolled on the 2019 Christmas Day special (watched by 18.5 million households), the nation was desperate to know what came next – including the cast. “After the last special I felt like a fan,” says Page. “I was like, ‘What happened? You can’t! What does Smithy say?’ But I wouldn’t put it past [Corden and Jones] to just leave it like that.”

Clarity came, in the end, with a round of exploratory phone calls in January 2024. “James called me out of the blue and asked if I was aware of the work of someone called Ruth Jones,” notes Horne, with a smile. Page, meanwhile, saw Corden’s name flash up on her phone and thought, instantly, “Oh my God, it’s actually happening!”

Predictably, everyone was keen to get the band back together for one last ride in Barry and Billericay. Which is not to say that any of them was trusted with so much as a plot hint as the months dragged on and production schedules were thrashed out. “They didn’t tell us anything that happened in the script,” confirms Horne. “But I had absolute trust.”

A few weeks before the July read-through, this faith was finally rewarded with an email that Page, fittingly, received in just about the most Gavin & Stacey location imaginable. “I’d just done a job and had stopped at a services to get a burger on my way home,” she explains. “I looked down at my phone and it said, ‘Gavin & Stacey: read-through script.’”

Desperate to find out the fate of the characters – yet also conscious of not getting a parking ticket – Page spent the next few hours driving from one service station to the next, learning the fates of Gav, Stacey, Nessa, Smithy and the gang. The finale is, she says, “classic Gavin & Stacey”. Horne goes further. “They have written the perfect ending,” he says.

Britain will have to wait until Christmas Day to open this present and find out what that ending is, however, as the cast have done their best to keep it under wraps. And that wasn’t always easy, as hordes of fans and photographers swarmed around filming locations in and around Barry Island.

For Page, some of that rabid interest was within her own family (she has four children with her husband, fellow actor James Thornton). Midway through filming, having not shared any plot spoilers with her 11-year-old daughter, Eva, the actor cleared everyone out of her bedroom so she could practise her lines.

“And then I looked underneath the bed and saw that she’d hidden an iPad under there to record everything,” she says, with a hoot. “Even in my own house I had to be careful what I said! The thought of being the person who cocks up and reveals something is absolutely terrifying.”

An even bigger battle loomed in stepping back into roles these actors first played almost 20 years ago. “Just before we started, I did say to my mum, ‘How am I going to play Stacey? I’m 47 now, I’ve got four kids and I don’t look the same as I used to look. So how can I still be that really excitable, bubbly girl?’” Page says.

It was left to her mum to remind her that Stacey Shipman – now a 40-something mother of three and in a 14-year marriage – has changed, too. “She’s grown in the way that I’ve grown,” she says. “So I didn’t overthink it and I just went and had a laugh.” Despite being “an emotional wreck” by the time she filmed her last scenes, she also appreciated how things had changed. “I wasn’t having to do the school run, I wasn’t cooking endlessly, people were bringing me cups of tea,” she says. “It was like a holiday.”

For Horne, after years of feeling somewhat typecast as the perennially befuddled straight man, filming the finale coincided with a new sense of gratitude. “There are worse things to be known for as an actor than Gavin Shipman,” says the 46-year-old. “The acceptance of that was really freeing.”

What’s more, he notes that changes in his life since the last special – he has a new son with his wife, set designer Celina Bassili – have brought him a closer affinity with his character. “Gavin has continually inspired me over the past 17 years – maybe he was the one that said I should be a dad, too.”

This rich sense of the passage of time is sure to be a key part of the finale’s potent cocktail. It’s also why, though Horne admires the fact Corden and Jones are “finishing on their own terms”, Page would welcome the possibility of a few more sporadic, Royle Family-style specials.

“I would love to come back every year,” she says. “But I genuinely don’t think there will ever be any more and I can really see why.” The truth of whether this will truly be the end is unknown. All we know for sure is that Christmas Day’s episode is going to bring tears, surprises, the absence of a visibly uncomfortable phone company employee and, if our families are anything like Page’s, some familiar joyful chaos.

“We’ll try to watch the special, but I’ll have a sherry or a wine and be shouting at everyone to be quiet, and then I’ll start crying because it’s the last one. It probably will be quite a Gavin & Stacey Christmas,” she says.

Billericay and Barry’s fictional lovebirds are about to fade from view. But you get the sense that they’ve left an indelible mark on the actors that brought them to life, and the viewers that got to savour every cracking moment.

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Gavin & Stacey returns to BBC One and iPlayer on Christmas Day at 9pm.

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