Gavin & Stacey is a slice of British life rarely seen on TV now… the show is a huge lesson for BBC chiefs

THERE was a revealing scene in the very moving Gavin & Stacey documentary on Wednesday night.

Writers James Corden and Ruth Jones discussed the reply from a BBC commissioner when they pitched the show as a one-off comedy called It’s My Day.

Then BBC Three boss Stuart Murphy said he loved it but had an issue: One episode wouldn’t work. He wanted six.

He got them. And the rest, much to our absolute pleasure, is history.

But thank God it was 20 years ago when this exchange took place.

Had it happened today, the issues with their brilliant comedy creation would have been significantly different.

Timid BBC bosses, brainwashed by the cult of wokeness, would have questions: Why is everyone on the show white?

Shouldn’t Dawn and Pete be Darren and Pete? Does Dave “Sugar T*ts” Coaches have to be such a misogynist?

Isn’t Bryn an unacceptable caricature of a Welshman?

Isn’t it a bit triggering to Harold Shipman’s victims to give Gavin’s family the same surname?

Isn’t the fishing trip story just homophobia?

Can we put Jason in a wheelchair? Can we make Nessa trans?

“Chinese Alan” is just racist, isn’t it?

And why is there no drag queen?

The list would doubtless go on, ticking other nonsensical boxes and mining micro-aggressions where none actually exist.

That the finale sailed through all these woke worries and made it to our screens is a Christmas miracle (no doubt helped by the 18million who tuned in to its last outing in 2019).

So credit to whoever waved it through. But I can only imagine how nervous some executives were at unleashing such an old-school comedy on to the fragile audience of 2024.

These dimwitted denizens of West London would have tied themselves in knots worrying about how Generation Snowflake would cope seeing Britain as it actually is for many (as we learned on Gavin & Stacey — A Fond Farewell, the show was based on a real-life wedding).

Permanently outraged

Well the answer was unequivocal: A massive 12.3million decided that not only were they not offended by this wonderful finale, in fact it made their Christmas.

A further six million more watched on iPlayer.

What’s occurin’? Just unbridled joy that we got to have one last festive visit from some of the best-drawn comedy characters since Only Fools And Horses trotted off our screens.

So there is a huge lesson here for BBC executives, whose failure to come up with any decent comedy shows is now the biggest joke at the corporation.

Go woke, go broke, has become an overused term. But as far as the BBC is concerned it is fast becoming its new mantra as they pander to a permanently outraged minority.

Commissioners need to urgently examine what it is about Gavin and Stacey that viewers love so much.

Not everyone knows a drag queen or someone who is trans

Colin Robertson

When they do, they might find that, for the vast majority of us, matters of diversity and inclusivity are secondary to what’s really important: A great story and a great script.

Shoehorning in characters and plotlines to satisfy focus groups of multicultural and lefty Londoners may not always be the answer.

In fact it could give you the complete opposite of what it is you’re looking for to cater to the 24million homes forced to pay £169.50 a year for your services.

You see, the truth is that most of Britain is not Shepherd’s Bush.

Very often in this country, heterosexual white people will marry other heterosexual white people. Their friends and family might be predominantly white, straight and able-bodied too.

Not everyone knows a drag queen or someone who is trans or whatever other gender they may imagine they are. And, yes, sometimes people say things that others will find offensive.

That’s just the way life is in Britain.

It’s high time the BBC remembered that.

Take it for Granted, Ross is a tough guy to beat

GLAD to see Ross Kemp is returning to EastEnders, which has quite frankly been crap since Grant and Phil regularly terrorised Albert Square.

No offence to Ross, who has had a pretty varied career and won a Bafta for his documentaries, but playing unreconstructed hardman Grant has been his best contribution to TV.

No one does brooding menace like Grant Mitchell. And no one does Grant Mitchell like Ross Kemp (an important point on a soap where the actors playing characters can be maddeningly interchangeable).

I hope his return for the 40th anniversary becomes permanent – and they don’t ruin it by bringing his wife Tiffany back from the dead. You wouldn’t put it past them.

Trans toilet result

WHATEVER 2025 may bring, you can bet your house on there being at least 365 more rows about gendered toilets.

Indeed, one was already kicking off in the police force just as Big Ben chimed midnight.

Men who have decided they are actually women – they are usually the pushy ones here – will continue to demand access to female facilities.

And actual women will, rightly, continue to be appalled that places where they are obviously vulnerable are being opened up to “people with penises”, to borrow a phrase from the trans zealots’ manual.

But there is a solution to this that helpfully already exists.

And one that is, I was interested to spot, officially in place at that famous gender war battleground – Corley services on the M6.

Here among the greasy fast food joints and deserted amusement arcade, the less than 300,000 trans people in Britain are free to use the toilets currently set aside for the disabled.

Such cubicles are, by their design, safe and private places where discretion is guaranteed – and are often empty.

Will we see other venues follow suit and rebrand their disabled toilets as multiple-use unisex facilities?

You’d hope so but I fear the militant trans lobby will be far from satisfied with this solution as it will kill one of its lines of attack stone dead.

THE Traitors has got off to a roaring start, deservedly so, as a new batch of devious attention seekers try to sucker each other out for our viewing pleasure.

Binning off three contestants before it even got started was next-level brutal (goodbye, Jack the beanstalk!).

But producers should introduce another instant justice feature. Anyone who misspells a name on their chalkboard will disappear through a trapdoor under their chair never to be seen again.

I’m sure you will agree Keith deserved to be murdered for spelling Nathan “Nather”.

Over to you, Klordia!

SO old codger Neil Young reckoned Glastonbury has become a “corporate turn-off” and therefore not, ahem, worthy of his morally superior presence, before quickly changing his tune and agreeing to do it.

Could this be the same Neil Young, left, who with Crazy Horse last year played such philanthropic forums as the Huntington Bank Pavilion and three other mega amphitheatres sponsored by FirstBank, Germania Insurance and Ameris Bank?

Keep on rockin’ in that corporation-free world, Neil.