For 90 minutes on Christmas Day, TV was a glorious, happy, woke-free zone again with Gavin & Stacey
IT’S not Gavin & Stacey’s fault, but I’d started hating the Christmas special long before it came to screen.
A resentment you can probably put down to personal failings and the fact that rolling news, the print media and even the BBC’s main bulletins seemed to be hyping the 90-minute episode’s expectations way beyond a point it could possibly deliver.
Without anything else worth watching on Christmas Day, since the last Gavin & Stacey special in 2019, the longing was as understandable as it was damning, I suppose.
But for the first half, at least, it seemed like all the pre-publicity had been a dreadful miscalculation.
The storyline was going nowhere and everyone, bar James Corden and Ruth Jones, who’ve written themselves the two best parts, seemed to be performing instead of acting, to an annoying degree in the cases of Rob “Bryn” Brydon and Alison “Pam” Steadman.
They clearly knew something we didn’t, though.
Because, as soon as Smithy and Sonia’s abortive wedding scene kicked in, everything made perfect sense.
It was an old-fashioned love story that had momentum, heart, soul, staggeringly good stars, Anna Maxwell Martin and Sheridan Smith, and also the good sense to flag up its own plot holes, on the final chase to Southampton Docks.
As I’m sure the whole audience was screaming “Give her a ring,” long before Joanna Page’s Stacey said “I’ll try her on her mobile” and Jason replied “Why didn’t we just call her in the first place?”
They would have looked daft, of course, if the show hadn’t delivered the ending the audience craved and deserved.
But it gave the people what they wanted, a Smithy and Nessa wedding, and spared them from the one thing that infected other significant parts of the BBC’s Christmas Day TV, preachiness.
For there were no gear-crunching references to diversity, as we got in the King’s Speech and EastEnders, nor was there any bleating about the arms trade, as in Doctor Who.
For 90 minutes on Christmas Day, TV was a glorious, happy, woke-free zone again.
And if you think the BBC will learn from Gavin & Stacey’s triumph and cut the political lectures in 2025?
Well, I’d settle back and watch the Christmas special again and again, if I were you.