James Corden calls 5-year Gavin & Stacey finale wait "a lesson in patience"

Hype is at an all-time high as we're now less than a week away from the answers that fans have long-desired, with Corden pointing out how the show has resisted a culture increasingly dominated by instant gratification.

At a press launch yesterday, the series co-creator said: "In the last few months, people have spoken a lot about why do we think that the show may have garnered the attention that it's got now?

"And the more I've thought about it, I sort of wonder if it's actually a lesson in patience."

Corden continued: "We're sort of told now, particularly in television or the way that we consume stuff, we talk about content, and we talk about consumers, and we talk about speed – and we've decided that speed is the single most important thing in everything that you can do.

"You get young people now watching things at twice the speed that it was ever meant to be formatted at. And you're told speed is important. And here's a show that ended 15 years ago, waited 10 years to tell another hour of the story, and waited five more years to end it."

He concluded: "Actually, maybe the lesson for all of us – for people that write about television, for people that talk about television, for people that write television – is [that] maybe time and patience and care might be the answer for things to have a longevity outside of what we consume on our phones."

The 2019 Gavin & Stacey reunion special broke ratings records with its enormous viewership of more than 17 million – and it's quite possible that this final episode could match or even exceed those figures, if the hype is any indication.

And if it lives up to the lofty expectations of fans, it will certainly have been worth the wait.

The full Gavin & Stacey cast returns for the special, including creators Corden and Ruth Jones, plus Mathew Horne, Joanna Page, Alison Steadman, Larry Lamb, Rob Brydon and Melanie Walters.

Gavin & Stacey returns to BBC One and iPlayer. Check out more of our Comedy coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on.

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