Gavin & Stacey: The Finale, BBC One review - hilarious high five to an indelible cast of characters

The most hyped special of the season came to a cosy comedy ending with pairings accomplished, evil witch Sonia and her coven dispatched and the usual everyday chaos reinstated. Tidy.

Except that I almost wanted Ruth Jones and James Corden to put a bomb under their famous creation and blow it apart with key expectations unmet, Nessa (Jones) literally at sea, Smithy (Coren) rebuffed and big questions left unanswered. It worked for Gone with the Wind, after all. But even with the feelgood factor on overdrive, it was a hilarious, satisfying last outing.

Not that it’s a really big question, but exactly what happened on that fishing trip all those years ago between Uncle Bryn (Rob Brydon) and nephew Jason (Robert Wilfort) will never be aired on-screen now. Other unresolved issues included: why on earth did it take Smithy (Corden) and Sonia (Laura Aikman) five years to get to the altar, and how come in all that time he didn’t notice how temperamentally and socially unsuited they were, what a prat she had made of him, cooing down the phone at her? As soon as you saw him at his pre-stag-party party (Robert Wilfort and James Corden, pictured below) having booze poured down his throat by Ness, you realised he wasn’t likely to stay married long to a brittle woman who clearly felt she was a cut above him and everyone he loved.

But we went through all the grand-finale motions: the gradual seeping out to his immediate circle, and to Smithy himself, of his true feelings for the mother of his child; the disastrous stag and hen nights, where the fissure between the bride’s and groom’s factions became a yawning canyon; the Jane Eyre scene in the church, where peace was not forever held, leading to a predictable mad dash to prevent Ness from going away for six months; the inevitable traffic jams en route, and so on.

More than at any other point in the 17-year history of the series, though, it felt as though Jones and Cordern were not entirely following the maverick instincts that made the series so unusual and special in the first place. The characters have often had a cheekily dark side, particularly the Barry Island brigade, as if the Welsh contingent in the creative team were having fun at their own expense by making their compatriots grotesquely eccentric, even borderline monstrous. From Gwen’s wide-eyed omelette obsession to Bryn’s strident, coercive OCD tendencies, they came across as distant Welsh relatives of the League of Gentlemen’s rural psychos and killer vets. 

Over in Essex, the Shipmans and their circle were still living it large in their own way, like big kids with too much pocket money. Several of their stalwarts turned up for cameos – Sheridan Smith as Smithy’s sister, Pam Ferris as his mother, Russell Tovey as pal Budgie, so wedded to his nickname that he’d forgotten his real one. (Remember that Stacey’s family are the Wests, so the two main groupings in the series were named after the UK’s most prolific serial killers. And the Shipmans’ best friends are Dawn and Peter Sutcliffe.)  

The writing throughout was as punchy as ever, in wonderful sequences like Ness on the promenade, after taking an elderly couple for an extortionate bike-taxi ride, telling them they could pay her by credit card – “I’ve got Bluetooth in my bra” – and urging the tremulous wife to hold her phone closer to her ample bosom for the transaction to go through. Or there was Bryn declaring he would be alone, “rattling round Barry like a bat in a boot” and yelling at Dave Coaches (Steffan Rhodri) that he wouldn’t recognise love if it was a passenger on his bus. There was some bravura dialogue, too, for Stacey (a still vibrant Joanna Page) in full flow as dominatrix Stephanie, her means of spicing up her sex life with Gav (an amiable, mature Mathew Horne). 

The reignited sexiness of their marriage was a reminder of the show’s title, and of the show’s interest in marriages and the health thereof. Pam (Alison Steadman) and Mick (Larry Lamb) had a chance to shine as well, Lamb showing his potential for gravitas in the face of his warm but hysterical wife, like a dam bracing itself for a deluge. But Dawn (Julia Davis) and Pete (Adrian Scarbrough) were also resurrected as a warning about the sour side of marriage.But it was Jones’s show, the presiding genius of the place. Her Nessa is a unique creation: an iron-willed woman with effortless putdowns and withering stares, yet one with a sweet streak too and a mad talent for reinvention. She quietly burned up the screen as she delivered, deadpan, her latest absurd, self-mythologising contribution to her CV: in this episode, the claim that she spent a year secretly living with two clients she met as a London cabbie, Hale and Pace. You so wanted it to be true.

Jones took her character’s outlandishness as seriously as she did her emotional life, and she’s a skilled actress whose unhappiness was palpable in her tear-filled eyes, so her sadness always hit home. I won’t miss Smithy quite so much – and may not have to if Corden is moved to resurrect the character for Comic Relief or suchlike. But I realise I will really miss hanging out with Nessa, a woman who could convincingly vape with her left hand while smoking a cigarette with her right, without missing a beat. A seriously cool comedy goddess. 

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