Warning: This article contains major spoilers for the Gavin & Stacey finale.
There wasn’t a dry eye in houses across the nation on Christmas Day, as Gavin & Stacey reached its emotional conclusion.
In the last ever episode of the Bafta-winning sitcom, Ruth Jones and James Corden’s characters, Nessa and Smithy, finally tied the knot, five years after keeping viewers on the edge of their seats thanks to that Christmas proposal.
However, it wasn’t all smooth sailing for the pair, with Smithy abandoning his wedding to Sonia and journeying all the way to Southampton – with the entire cast of characters – to try and stop Nessa from boarding a boat overseas.
And while it made for gripping viewing, Ruth has admitted the scene was originally supposed to play out very differently.
“It was originally going to be in an airport,” she told press at a pre-Christmas screening of the episode (as reported by Cosmopolitan). ”[But] we couldn’t get permission to film – because it had to be in Cardiff Airport.
“Initially we thought, ‘Oh no, this is awful. What we’re going to do? Because it’s meant to be this big reunion scene in the airport. Where can we do it?’ And then we came up with Southhampton.”
James added that production designer David Ferris had already warned the team: “I don’t think it should be an airport. I don’t think we’ll ever be able to make it secure enough. It will still be a working airport. It’s going to be very difficult. Should it not be the ships?”
Apparently, it was only when Ruth remembered Nessa’s own history of working on ships that they agreed this was the way to go with the episode.
Gavin & Stacey’s feature-length finale received near-unanimous praise from both fans and critics when it finally aired last week, and became the most-watched Christmas Day broadcast in 16 years.
In the end, the episode pulled in an average of 12.3 million viewers (not including those of us who watched it on BBC iPlayer), beating the festive special from five years earlier, which clocked in at 11.6 million.