It’s a universal truth of TV that a show’s main characters are often the least interesting thing about it. Wouldn’t you much rather spend a night in the pub with one of the side characters who has half the screen time but double the impact? Never has this been truer than in Gavin & Stacey. Mathew Horne’s Gavin and Joanna Page’s Stacey are perfectly nice. In fact, their generic niceness is their defining characteristic, bar Gavin’s fondness for Fred Perry (despite the fact I’ve watched the sitcom approximately 15 times, this is practically the only trait of his that I can remember). And it’s their relationship, initially carried out long-distance between Billericay in Essex and Barry Island near Cardiff, that is the show’s most straightforward plot engine.
Yet the title couple get none of the best lines, and as time goes on, it becomes clear that they mainly exist as an excuse for the oddballs in their respective families to be crammed into the same suburban sitting room. For some, it’s the show’s co-creators James Corden and Ruth Jones that are the heart of the comedy, in their roles as the protagonists’ best mates Smithy and Nessa, whose will-they, won’t-they romance has simmered throughout three seasons and, as of tonight, two festive specials. But, respectfully, those viewers are wrong. Because the show’s true stars are its trio of older women: Alison Steadman’s Pamela(r), Julia Davis’s Dawn and Melanie Walters’s Gwen.
Back in the Noughties, when Gavin & Stacey began, it was still pretty common for women in sitcoms, especially those over the age of 40, to be underwritten bit parts: stereotyped sounding boards for the blokes’ banter. All three of these characters are rooted in archetypes: the Essex wife slash overbearing mother-in-law, the harridan who’s constantly nagging her (equally awful) husband, the kindly widow always ready to dish up an omelette. But they are cleverly invested with sharply observed idiosyncrasies that mean they’re constantly stealing scenes; like so many classic comedy creations, they’re so specifically drawn that they somehow become universal.
In the years since the show first aired, their appeal has only intensified. In fact, if Corden’s public polling has taken a nose dive since he first burst onto our screens as Smithy, theirs has followed the opposite trajectory. When Gavin & Stacey hasn’t been on air, they’ve enjoyed new life online thanks to the fabulous rise of hun culture: the irony-laden social media subculture that’s all about celebrating female celebrities and characters who are gloriously ordinary and a bit naff, but extremely camp at the same time. A wobbly Pam telling her bemused son that she’s “not drunk drunk, but I have had some wines”? Peak hun. Her and best friend Dawn sneaking out to the garden for a surreptitious cigarette, their first since the Eighties, because they “just fancy it”? Huntastic.
The show’s undisputed queen is Steadman’s Pam, Essex matriarch and overzealous mother to her “little prince” Gavin. She’s a faux vegetarian in a pink velour tracksuit who scoffs down ham when she thinks no one is looking and was Camilla Parker Bowles’s biggest fan back in the days when the now-Queen was tabloid persona non grata. Steadman met Jones and Corden in the early Noughties, when they starred in ITV drama Fat Friends, and told The Independent in a 2011 interview that she was instantly taken with the offbeat way that viewers first meet Pam. “Gavin’s come home from work and a lot of writers would do a scene like, ‘Hello Mum, you alright?’ ‘Hello son, do you want a cup of tea?’” she said. Instead, she recalled, we see Pam “lying on the couch with cucumbers on her eyes stretched out”, weeping over some badgers on a nature programme, who she’s convinced were crying too (“I know what I saw,” she tells Gavin darkly when he dares question her). Immediately, she’s sketched out as a highly strung drama queen, but one with a big heart.
The actor has always modestly maintained that it’s all about the script, but it’s her skill that really brings Pam to life. Steadman, now 78, remains one of our very best comic performers, with a wonderful knack for observing eccentricities; she based Pam on the women she encountered when she moved from Liverpool to Loughton to attend drama school in the Sixties. There are also shades of Beverly, the character she played on stage and in the TV film Abigail’s Party in 1977, directed by her then-husband Mike Leigh. Beverly is an Essex beautician and social climber who’s riddled with insecurities about her hard-won middle-class status. Pam is a softer, more appealing version, obsessed with how she appears to others but willing to laugh about it after a few wines with “Dawny”, who is played as a woman on the edge by another British comedy icon, Julia Davis.
There’s an intriguing darkness to Dawn that is rare to see in a relatively straightforward sitcom. Her dysfunctional marriage to Pete (Adrian Scarborough, also brilliant) is mined for laughs until their insults get just a little too close to the bone: “You vicious little pig,” Davis practically spits at her husband in one scene, imbuing those four words with pure poison. A season two scene where Gavin, Stacey and their family and friends crowd into an Italian restaurant, where they see Dawn and Pete having a silent dinner with a man they’d tried to recruit into a threesome, only for him to reject them on the count of them looking nothing like the pictures they’d posted online, is one of the show’s bleakest moments – in fact, it wouldn’t feel too out of place in Nighty Night, Davis’s outrageous 2004 black comedy.
Her Gavin & Stacey character is a true suburban grotesque, a slightly more palatable sibling to Jill Tyrell, the narcissistic beauty salon owner played by Davis in that earlier show, who terrorises her buttoned-up neighbours and fakes her own husband’s death. Dawn and Pete feel like the dark foil to Pam and Mick (Larry Lamb)’s happy partnership, the answer to the uncomfortable question of: what happens when you dedicate your life to unabashedly hating the person you sleep next to? Should they just get a divorce and be done with it, despite having recited the lyrics to Coldplay’s “Fix You” to one another at their vow renewal? Or would a breakup just cause them both to crumble, like the spiteful inverse of those elderly spouses who die of broken hearts after their beloved passes on? Is this all some sort of bizarre psychosexual game? The undeniable weirdness gives Gavin & Stacey a slightly unsettling edge, beneath all the “What’s occurin’?” quotability.
Stacey’s mum Gwen, meanwhile, is perhaps the most straightforward of the three, a much-needed balance to her Essex counterpart’s slightly manic energy and the perfect foil to her more exuberant brother, Bryn (Rob Brydon). She’s a relatively conventional character, so it might have been tempting to write her as small-minded and even conservative with a small c. Instead, though, she is one of the most open-minded in the show’s ensemble, whether she is listening to her OAP neighbour Doris (RIP) recall her latest improbable sexcapades or holding together an unconventional family set-up that also encompasses Stacey’s best pal Nessa and her son. Although said family often take advantage of Gwen’s kindness, Walters plays her with a core of steel – plus, the sing-song quality of her voice means that she can land a zinger of an insult without anyone realising that she’s skewered them.
As the show returns for its last-ever hurrah, everyone’s talking about whether Smithy has accepted Nessa’s proposal after the previous Christmas special ended on a cliffhanger. Frankly, though, I’m far more concerned about what’s going on with Barry and Billericay’s premier huns. Is Pam now Queen Camilla’s biggest fan, turning up waving flags to her royal walkabouts? Has she adopted a pretend plant-based diet? Has Dawn opened her marriage (again)? Has Gwen found a new calling as a TikTok therapist? Whatever happens, here’s hoping that the finale provides a fitting send-off for these scene-stealing characters and the performers who play them – I’ll drink “some wines” to that.
Gavin & Stacey: The Finale is on BBC One and BBC iPlayer at 9pm on 25 December
