Building a surprise
I’ve never really got into the TV series Gavin and Stacey but I decided to watch the finale and the documentary about the making of it. The finale was brilliantly written and the documentary gave some insight into how they did this.
There was one key part that stood out for me (about 31 minutes into it). James Corden, one of the co-writers and stars of the programme, was explaining how they design the surprises that appear regularly - especially in the Christmas specials.
There are the lead characters, supporting characters and the audience. At any one point in every single scene one of those three shouldn’t know what’s going on.
A surprise does not need to be for everyone - it can be for only one and still work.
As an aside, the series is partly filmed in Barry in South Wales. When I went to university in Cardiff, near to Barry, I turned up on the first day having been told I had accommodation allocated and found out that they had messed up. I ended up sleeping on one of about 60 camp beds lined up in an old psychology library for my first few days.
At one point they said they were going to close it and move people out to the holiday camp at Barry Island and bus people to and from lectures. I decided I would rather find a house to live in and did that.
So I almost ended up living for a while in Barry due to a mess up that led to a surprise; clearly I was the one who didn’t know it was going to happen.
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