May I Have Your Attention Please?

by James Corden

  It took a while for it all to sink in. So that was the next step then – a movie of the play and then a world tour with the chance of six months or more on Broadway. Exciting as that was, there were some big implications – it meant a long time away from the people we most cared about.

  And specifically for me, that meant Shelley. For a while now, things had been a little hard for us. We were living together in a flat I’d bought in Beaconsfield, above a Chinese restaurant on the high street. We still loved each other lots – that was never the issue – but I’d been in the play for a year by this point, which meant I was working every evening while Shell was still working days. We were like ships in the night. We’d not been spending enough time together to make the relationship work.

  The hardest thing about starting going out with someone when you’re only eighteen is that you don’t really know what a long-term relationship looks and feels like. You don’t have a proper idea of the effort you’ll have to keep putting in, or the changes you’ll both go through as you grow up. And, if you’re not ready to allow for those changes, then you’ll be in trouble. It’s not a big issue when you get together, because the intensity of your feelings for each other can pull you over any early bumps in the road. But if you don’t put the effort or time in, before you know it, those bumps have become mountains and you’re stuck at the bottom without the right equipment and … Well, you know the rest. I’ll finish there before I torture this metaphor any more.

  Anyway, that’s me jumping ahead. The truth is, Shelley was delighted for me when I told her about the tour – she couldn’t have been more excited or supportive. She told me that if I didn’t go, I’d regret it for the rest of my life. So that was that. The next year or so of my life was all laid out in front of me. It seemed, right then, as if it couldn’t get any sweeter – I was about to spend a year going round the world with a bunch of guys who were fast becoming my best friends … and then, ITV called.

  As I mentioned before, Ruth and I had sent our early treatment off to ITV with an outside hope of someone there liking it. We’d sent it to Sioned William, the head of comedy at the time, because she was Welsh and we thought she’d get the dialogue and understand the characters.

  We’d waited a while but heard nothing back and so we’d kind of thought they hadn’t liked it. But then, out of the blue, we got a call asking us to come to Sioned’s office on Gray’s Inn Road to have a chat. I remember it very clearly because the closest Ruth and I could park was outside number 3 and the office was at number 426, but that did give us time to run through what we were going to say in the meeting. And to start preparations for next year’s London Marathon.

  The meet with Sioned went better than we could have imagined. As soon as we sat down, she told us she loved it, that the characters were spot on and that it would be perfect as a one-off hour-long film. She went as far as asking us if we had any cast in mind, and we talked loosely about Rob Brydon and Alison Steadman. The vibe in the room was so positive that it felt as if there was a good possibility of it getting made. After that long wait for any answer at all, it was way more than we had expected.

  But – and here’s the kicker – nothing got green-lit in that meeting. At ITV, and it’s the same with every other TV station I know of, that first meeting is only the beginning of a very long road. After the initial stages, they have what they call ‘commissioning rounds’, which is when a potential new show is taken to the other commissioners and controllers who decide whether it’s something that they think could work.

  As Sioned took it off to do the rounds, we were very hopeful. She’d been so positive about the material that we’d already been talking about potential actors, so what more was there? It was surely in the bag. Dad was, as ever, trying to make sure I didn’t get carried away, and this time – annoyingly – he was right. A couple of weeks later, Sioned came back and told us they wouldn’t be doing it. It was tough to hear. No matter how much you think you understand the business and all its pitfalls, when someone has been positive, it’s near impossible not to get carried away. She told us that everybody appreciated there was something there, that they all really liked the characters, but the bottom line was, they didn’t think it was quite right for them.

  It was a setback, without a doubt, but it wasn’t enough to knock our belief in what we had. ITV hadn’t gone for it, but they had said a lot of nice things about it, so we got back on the horse and sent it out again, this time to Stuart Murphy, a friend of Ruth’s, who was the controller of BBC3. Stuart is an ultra-sharp, very talented guy – he’d been responsible for commissioning Little Britain and Nighty Night, as well as The Mighty Boosh – and was renowned for taking risks. He also has the ability sometimes to see even beyond the writers’ vision – he was a godsend.

  Stuart had had the treatment about a week and we’d not heard anything back when one evening I happened to bump into him in a bar. (Definitely a bump into. Honestly. I was not stalking him.) Rather sheepishly, I mentioned our treatment and, very sweetly, he told me it was on his desk and he was going to look at it the next day. I know people tell you that kind of thing all the time, but he seemed very genuine so I nipped outside and phoned Ruth.

  Ruth knew Stuart better than I did, and she told me that if that’s what he said, then that’s what he meant. So, for the next few days we waited. We waited and we waited and we waited. I know it was only a few days – I’ve waited longer for a hair appointment – and I’m overdoing it, but this was big. Anyway, we waited some more and then, finally, my phone rang. It was Ruth.

  ‘James,’ she said, ‘are you sitting down?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Sit down.’

  I sat.

  ‘OK,’ she said, ‘listen to this email I just got from Stuart Murphy.’ Then she began to read:

  ‘“Dear Ruth and James, sorry about only sending this to Ruth, but I don’t have James’s email. I’ve just finished reading your treatment and I have to tell you I think it’s absolutely brilliant.”’

  ‘Oh my God!’

  ‘Wait,’ Ruth said, ‘there’s more. “I do have some reservations, however.”’

  ‘Oh shit!’

  ‘“The truth is,”’ Ruth read on, ‘“we don’t really have a slot for an hour-long one-off comedy like this. I also think it would be a waste of what is clearly a brilliant story with well-rounded characters and insightful dialogue. I think this could be a series. The back story you’ve written is as interesting as everything else. Have you thought about that? Forgive me if I’m speaking out of turn, but if you’re interested in doing this as a series, I’m really keen to discuss it. Regards, Stuart.”’

  And then came the killer line, the line that when we were having a bad day writing would always keep us on track:

  ‘“PS I believe this could be the best thing BBC3 ever makes.”’

  I don’t know, maybe he puts that at the bottom of all his emails – ‘PS I believe you could be the best IT person I’ve ever met. Now please come and sort out my printer’ – but Stuart’s enthusiasm and confidence were a massive help to us all throughout the writing and filming process. Right from the beginning, he saw something that nobody else did. The truth is that the treatment wasn’t actually that good, but Stuart managed to see past that and grasp what Gavin & Stacey could become. The upshot of our meeting was that we would be commissioned to write the first episode. Boom!

  Ruth really came into her own now. When there’s stuff that needs doing, there is no one better than Ruth Jones to do it. When we got that email, she was shooting Nighty Night for Baby Cow, the same production company that had made Cruise of the Gods, as well as loads of other brilliant stuff. We had a chat and decided to give the treatment to Henry Normal, the head of Baby Cow. They were exactly the kind of people who would understand the show and, if a series was green-lit, we wanted them to make it.

  Henry had a read of the material, got us in for a meeting and we pretty quickly sorted out all the arrangements: Ruth and I wo
uld write the scripts (with lots of helpful suggestions from Henry), Henry and the lovely Lindsay Hughes would be the executive producers and Ted Dowd, a beautiful man with a beautiful face, would physically produce it. We would all work together on crew, cast, locations, script supervision and everything else, then deliver the finished product to the BBC. It’s important to remember that at this point all we really had was Stuart’s enthusiasm; we were still miles away from any guarantee of a series. The BBC commissions lots and lots of scripts, with maybe two in ten actually being made. The odds were against us, but with the crack team we’d sorted, we felt we had a pretty good shot.

  So Ruth and I had to write a script that would make the BBC want to commission a series. And because of all the other stuff going on – the play and Ruth’s TV commitments – we only had two full days to do it: a Tuesday morning, a Thursday afternoon and all day Sunday. If we didn’t get the episode written in that time, it would be six weeks until we could sit down again, and we’d lose the momentum. The heat was on.

  We didn’t start well. By the end of the Thursday afternoon, we’d only written seven pages. A BBC half-hour is about thirty-seven pages in length, so that meant we had to write thirty more that coming Sunday.

  I got to Ruth’s hotel at 9 a.m. and we both knew neither of us would be leaving until that first episode was not only finished but written to a very high, so-good-the-BBC-will-commission-it standard.

  Luck was on our side. We got completely into the zone and the material started to flow, just as it had done back at the bar in Leeds. We’d already worked out the main characters: Gavin, Stacey, Smithy and Vanessa, but we now decided that Ruth would play Nessa instead of Stacey because she was a no-nonsense, straight-talking kind of woman of considerable experience.

  We wanted the characters to be identifiable. They had to walk and talk the way we did, say and do stupid things, make mistakes, be like normal, regular people. We wanted the show to feel as natural as possible. For instance, if someone made a funny joke, then the people around them should laugh. Often in comedy, a character cracks a gag and you have the canned laughter, but there’s no reaction from the other people on screen. In our show, the characters would laugh, and hopefully the people watching would too.

  Once we’d established the ground rules, we started sketching out the families: Gavin’s mum and dad should be this outgoing, flirty couple who we called Pam and Mick; Stacey had lost her father – we thought that down the line it would create a really emotional soul to the series – but she was looked after by her uncle Bryn and her mum, Gwen. Once we had all the core characters, we just started writing. Or rather, Ruth did. I paced up and down, lay on the floor, sat on the windowsill – I just couldn’t stay still.

  One of the first things we wrote was Smithy’s introduction, when he walks in on Pam, Mick and Gavin all having dinner. Ruth suggested he should come in with a bit of a bang. I thought about it for a moment and then just opened my mouth: ‘Gavlar!’ I said. ‘Pam-la! Mick!’ I’m not sure why I said it, but Ruth liked it so we put it in the scene. It never crossed my mind that those few words might one day sort of define me. Rarely does a day go by when someone doesn’t shout that line at me across the street. It’s even printed on T-shirts and mugs. I have no idea what part of my brain it jumped from.

  There was a lot of cool stuff going on that day at the hotel. When I arrived, I had to queue in reception to get a swipe card, and while I was standing there I noticed Guy Garvey from the band Elbow checking in ahead of me. Elbow are one of my favourite bands – they’re an incredible group who make music with a heart that never fails to move me. And there he was, right there, in the lobby. It turned out he was in the room directly below the one we were writing in. We had the window open to stop it from getting too stuffy and all day we could hear the wistful sounds of an acoustic guitar, and occasionally Guy’s voice, drifting up from downstairs. It was beautiful.

  Two and a half years later, we were at The South Bank Show Awards, picking up the award for ‘Best Comedy’, on the same night that Elbow won for their album The Seldom Seen Kid. I spoke to Guy and told him that I’d seen him in reception on the day that we wrote the first episode. Guy told me that he’d been writing some songs for the album at the time and that he remembered writing some of them in that very hotel. Imagine that, The Seldom Seen Kid and Gavin & Stacey both being written in the same place on the very same day. Cool.

  I didn’t leave Ruth’s room until nearly midnight. We spent all day riffing in character, improvising, getting the dialogue first, then working out the mechanics of the scene after. Once we had all that, we’d finally write it down. It’s the only way we can do it. We have to be physically together and bouncing off each other in order to get the level of spontaneity.

  By the time we finally finished that day, we were totally exhausted, but we were pretty sure that we’d written a good episode. We sent out the two copies to Henry and Stuart, necked a couple of club sandwiches and went our separate ways – I went off to The History Boys shoot and Ruth went back to the Little Britain set. We’d done all we could – we were back to waiting.

  The History Boys shoot was filmed over the summer at some grammar schools in Watford, as well as on location in Harrogate. Escaping from the confines of the National Theatre seemed to reinvigorate us all. There was a football pitch at one of the schools and whenever we weren’t filming we would be out there kicking a ball around. All the old jokes and nicknames were still there – ‘Dirtbox’ was still ‘Dirtbox’ (and I still can’t tell you why) – only now we had more room to spread our wings and our friendships became even deeper.

  The laughs we had on set were perfect for taking my mind off the Gavin & Stacey script. Over the summer we didn’t hear anything back but, right at the end of the shoot, when I’d almost given up again, Ruth, Henry and I all got called into the BBC to have a chat about the first episode. It was the first time I’d been to Television Centre. Since then I’ve been loads of times, but nothing changes – I still get that tingle of excitement walking through the doors. I even got it the day Smithy pulled up outside in the Volvo with George Michael in the passenger seat. (Well, probably more so then, ‘cos I was sitting next to George Michael.) It’s the history of the place, all the incredible shows that have been made there, like Blackadder, Porridge, The Two Ronnies. I always love going there.

  Ruth and I were both quite nervous going into that meeting – it felt like the culmination of a lot of work and thought, and neither of us wanted it to end here. But, as it turned out, we had no reason to worry. Cheryl Taylor and Lucy Lumsden, the two comedy commissioners we met with, told us from the very start how much they loved the material and that they were really keen for us to write more. Initially, they asked us just to do another couple of episodes, but Henry managed to persuade them to commit to us writing a full series. Six episodes. That meant a lot of work. Then, for the first time, they mentioned shooting it, which made it much more real. We were no longer just talking about words on a page: this was gonna be a TV show – our TV show. But with that came the problem: they wanted us to think about filming it in April or May of the following year.

  ‘Ah,’ I said, ‘in January I’m going away for an eight-month tour with The History Boys.’

  Silence.

  ‘It might not be eight months,’ I added quickly. ‘I mean, the show could flop and I’ll be back much sooner.’ I thought about that for a moment and knew I had to be honest. ‘On the other hand, it’s done really well so far and if that’s the case in New York, I won’t be back until the end of September.’ I waited for their answer, biting my lip. Surely my schedule wasn’t going to screw us now.

  ‘Well,’ said Lucy, ‘let’s just see how it goes. Go ahead and write the series and we’ll take it from there.’

  Phew.

  We left that meeting totally elated, and with a whole lot of work to do. This was the end of October and in roughly four months’ time I’d be on my way to Hong Kong. We had to get this ba
by written, and fast. We quickly got a routine together. Ruth would come up to mine in Beaconsfield for two and a half days, she’d sleep on our sofa bed and we’d write in the kitchen. Then she’d go home, we’d give it a day and then I’d drive down to Cardiff and we’d do another couple of days at her house.

  So that’s how the first series of Gavin & Stacey was written, back and forth along the M4 between Beaconsfield and Cardiff. It worked. We would spend entire days just laughing together. There were the big landmark moments, like when we decided that Stacey had been engaged five times already before Gavin popped the question, or when we first thought up the fishing-trip subplot. Those days were some of the best. As time went on, we built up such a deep affection for the characters that we more or less fell in love with them. And Ruth and I kind of did the same. (Whoa, not like that.) The more time we spent together, the more we became part of each other’s lives. It’s inevitable really, when you work that closely with somebody. There was an openness and honesty to our relationship that was absolutely vital to making the show as good as it could be. If you think something doesn’t work, especially in comedy, you have to be allowed to say so, and Ruth and I never felt as if there were any no-go areas with each other.

  We worked solidly for those two months but, by the turn of the year, and with me off on tour in a couple of months, we hadn’t quite finished episode six. We had the first five in the bag, but we’d just run out of time with the last. And that was the one we’d been working towards – that the whole series had been working towards – the wedding. Christmas came and went and when we spoke to Henry about the last episode, he said not to worry too much about it. He thought that what we were delivering would be enough for the BBC to make the call on whether they wanted to shoot it or not. So we sent everything in and, before I knew it, it was time to go on tour.