Yahoo News Gavin & Stacey's Ruth Jones says Xmas special was nearly scrapped
The Gavin & Stacey Christmas special is the most anticipated TV event of the festive period (sorry, Mrs Brown's Boys), but it almost didn't happen.
Ruth Jones revealed at an event in Cardiff (via Press Association) that she began writing the script with James Corden, who she wrote the series with, but they hit a rather large snag.
"It wasn’t easy that week because, bearing in mind we hadn’t written it for years and years. We’d had ideas for characters, lines of dialogue, going back and forth, but we hadn’t sat down and written a script," she said. "We weren’t match fit anymore, where before we’d written series after series, three series’ in a row.
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"And you know James and I hadn’t spent that much time together. We’d seen each other and spoken together, but we hadn’t sat down and written for a long time. So there was a lot at stake.
"We got to halfway through the week… and we hadn’t even got to halfway through the first part of the story. So there’s a lot of rewriting, reshuffling, discussing."
It seemed at one point that the special wasn't going to happen at all. "One night we thought, let’s just give up, because it just didn’t seem to be," Ruth said.
"I don’t know, there was something missing and I couldn’t pinpoint it. We had dinner with our partners, and we got talking, something sparked something off, that led one thing to another and, I don’t know how it happened, but out of the blue we just got this idea and I think that was the heart of this Christmas special."
And we're so thankful that they persevered. It was also recently revealed that ITV originally passed on the hugely popular sitcom. They have probably been kicking themselves ever since.
Gavin & Stacey returns on Christmas Day at 8:30pm on BBC One.
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