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