What's occurring? Gavin & Stacey re-uniting for another special, that's what
After five years clinging to a cliffhanger, we may finally get a conclusion...
One of the greatest Christmas traditions is returning. A new Christmas special of Gavin & Stacey is reportedly in the works.
A 2024 Gavin & Stacey Christmas special is currently in pre-production, according to Deadline, with plans to begin shooting in the coming months.
We had lost track to quite how long it has been since we’ve had a fresh Gavin & Stacey episode. The last special was in 2019, back in those heady pre-Covid days.
That special ended (spoiler alert for five years ago) with Nessa proposing to Smithy, but the scene cut before we got to see the outcome.
This return of the show may have something to do with James Corden — to the chagrin of some — returning to the UK after eight years living in the US.
“I genuinely don’t know if we’ll ever do another one,” Corden told the Royal Television Society during an interview published in October 2023.
“I think Ruth and I would love to make something together again. I don’t know if that will be Gavin & Stacey. We feel so proud of that last special,” he said. “Maybe there’s something truly perfect about it ending there. Can we truly fulfil people’s ambitions for it? I don’t know.”
Well it sounds like the writing duo decided a return to the series was worth it after all.
Gavin & Stacey is also the one show Ruth Jones and James Corden have written together — the only one actually made into a finished programme, at any rate. The show was first broadcast in 2007, and has an outsized influence within UK popular culture considering there are only three main-line series.
Since those early days, Ruth Jones made the Stella TV show, which ran for six seasons.
According to Deadline, the new Gavin & Stacey special is being produced for the BBC by three production companies, owned (or co-owned) by Ruth Jones, James Corden and Steve Coogan. These are Tidy Productions, Falwell 73 and Baby Cow, which produced the original three series too.
There’s another little gossipy sting to this story from The Sun too. Its source claims Netflix made an attempt to snag this special from the BBC with a wheelbarrow of cash, but was unsuccessful.
“The provisional Netflix offer, coming as it does from a global conglomerate, dwarfs anything that the Beeb could offer — but Ruth and James aren’t about the money,” says the source cited by The Sun.
The Gavin & Stacey 2024 Christmas special is expected to start filming this summer. All previous episode of the show are available to stream on BBC iPlayer for UK viewers, or on Britbox.
