Meeting old friends after a long period apart can be a little daunting.
Sometimes you’ve both grown apart and the chemistry once there has all but evaporated.
Gavin and Stacey popped in for a Christmas Day visit after a nine-year hiatus and, happily, the spark – or the warm glow, more accurately – is still there.
The same couldn’t be said for the titular couple’s relationship.
Stacey was worried the pair – now middle-aged, somewhat distressingly – had slipped into autopilot.
Her concerns came out in an achingly sweet moment plonked halfway through this Christmas episode as she and Gav reconnected on the familiar sweeping Barry promenade. Writers Ruth Jones and James Corden got that drama out the way early so they could concentrate on Ness and Smithy – their own characters, of course.
Their on-again, off-again romance was off-again. Smithy had met someone new but thankfully she was awful, setting up an emotional reunion with Ness we all knew was coming.
Except it didn’t quite arrive.
It looks like there are more of these on the cards. Who knows, maybe we’ll finally find out what happened on Bryn’s fishing trip.
Given the strength of this one-off festive episode, I’d be more than happy to drop in on the Barry crew every few years.
I loves it, I do.
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