Gavin And Stacey star James Corden has said his character Neil "Smithy" Smith and Vanessa "Nessa" Jenkins had to "end together" in the series' final episode on Christmas Day.
The 46-year-old was speaking in Wednesday’s Gavin And Stacey: A Fond Farewell documentary, where he also revealed that the character of Sonia (Laura Aikman), who Smithy is seen preparing to marry at the start of the Christmas Day episode, was brought back as she "wasn’t in people’s minds".
Gavin And Stacey: The Finale saw Smithy finally decide to marry Nessa, played by series co-writer Ruth Jones, after aborting his wedding to Sonia at the altar, while Stacey’s mother Gwen West (Melanie Walters) is revealed to be in a secret relationship with Dave Coaches (Steffan Rhodri).
Speaking about the final episode’s ending, co-writer Corden said: "Probably from the first Christmas special that we did, when Dave proposes and Smithy says, 'Don’t marry him’, from that minute on it felt like they had to end together.
"And that’s what he says in this last scene, ‘I know it’s messy and not perfect, but that’s because we’re messy and not perfect’."
Jones added: "When Smithy and Nessa got together, that really is the end, because we can never see them actually together.
"Seeing Smithy put the bins out, it just won’t work."
Jones said she had also "always wanted Gwen to have a relationship", while Corden spoke about why he chose to reintroduce Sonia.
He said: "No-one would ever say, did he choose Nessa or Sonia? Sonia sort of just wasn’t in people’s minds that (it) was something that might happen."
Elsewhere in the documentary, the writers discuss sending the initial plans for the first series to BBC Three controller Stuart Murphy, who replied with a letter which read: "I think it could be one of the best things we ever do."
Corden explained that he had the idea for the show after a wedding he went to where all of the attendees were from Barry Island, where the show is set, and after a friend married a woman who he met after regularly speaking to her on the phone in his sales job, as the show’s main characters do.
Jones and Corden also explain how they almost decided against the show’s 2019 Christmas special.
Corden said: "The 2019 special, I don’t know if people know this, we gave up on it at one point.
"We’d written, maybe halfway through, and we read it, and we were like, this is rubbish, this is awful, it’s terrible.
"I remember saying to each other, ‘Well, thank god we didn’t call the BBC’.
"So we ate dinner in my kitchen, and I said, ‘Look, I think we probably owe it to the show to go back in and talk about why it’s bad and say goodbye to it’.
Source: Press Association
