James Corden believes Gavin and Stacey's legacy can be a "lesson in patience" for viewers and the TV industry.
James Corden
The BBC sitcom will come to an end on Christmas Day (25.12.24) with a finale episode - written by James and the show's co-creator Ruth Jones - five years after the programme's penultimate episode, a 2019 festive special that attracted more than 17 million viewers live or on catch-up during the subsequent week.
The 2019 episode achieved such impressive figures nearly 10 years after Gavin and Stacey's third and final series culminated on New Year's Day 2010, and James believes the show's success could be partly down to the years-long wait for a follow up.
He said: "In the last few months, people have spoken a lot about why do we think that the show may have garnered the attention that it's got now?
"And the more I've thought about it, I sort of wonder if it's actually a lesson in patience.
"We're sort of told now, particularly in television or the way that we consume stuff, we talk about content, and we talk about consumers, and we talk about speed - and we've decided that speed is the single most important thing in everything that you can do.
"You get young people now watching things at twice the speed that it was ever meant to be formatted at. And you're told speed is important.
"And here's a show that ended 15 years ago, waited 10 years to tell another hour of the story, and waited five more years to end it."
James believes "time and patience and care" could be the answer for TV show "longevity" going forward.
He said: "Actually, maybe the lesson for all of us - for people that write about television, for people that talk about television, for people that write television - is [that] maybe time and patience and care might be the answer for things to have a longevity outside of what we consume on our phones."
In the upcoming special, James and Ruth will reprise their roles of Smithy and Nessa respectively, and Mathew Horne and Joanna Page will be back as titular characters Gavin and Stacey.