The family of Gavin & Stacey star Laura Aikman only found out she was returning to the sitcom while they watched the finale on Christmas Day.

The 39-year-old actress shared a video on her Instagram showing her family screaming in shock as her character Sonia appeared in the episode.

Sonia, the ex-girlfriend of James Corden’s character Neil “Smithy” Smith, appears in the final Christmas special in a crucial plot twist.

One member of Aikman’s family can be heard shouting “press pause” while another tells her “you never told me”.

“We never told anyone,” Aikman replies.

Sharing the video on Instagram she wrote “the moment my family realise Sonia is ruining Christmas again” and captioned it: “I take an NDA very seriously.”

She also shared a photo of a cast board of all the Gavin & Stacey characters, with a space missing where her picture would have been.

Aikman joined Gavin & Stacey as Sonia in the last Christmas Day episode in 2019, when Smithy brought his girlfriend to meet his family and friends.

But she did not get on with the group and left before Smithy could propose to her as he had planned.

Vanessa “Nessa” Jenkins, played by Ruth Jones, later got down on one knee and confessed her love for Smithy, but before he could respond to her proposal the episode ended on a cliffhanger.

Fans have waited five years to find out his answer, with the 2024 Christmas Day episode opening with the family of Stacey Shipman, played by Joanna Page, and her husband Gavin, portrayed by Mathew Horne, preparing for a wedding.

The BBC said the episode secured the highest overnight Christmas Day ratings since 2008.

The 90-minute episode drew an average audience of 12.3 million, according to overnight figures, surpassing the show’s 2019 Christmas special by more than half-a-million viewers.

It’s been five years since since we last caught up with Gavin and Stacey, and, more importantly, since Nessa got down on one knee to propose to Smithy.

Left on a Christmas cliffhanger, not since Rachel got off the plane has the nation been so invested in the fate of a will-they-won’t-they. Because Gavin and Stacey might have sweetly brought the worlds of Billericay and Barry together, but Nessa and Smithy’s anti-romance provided the comedy heart.

At a screening just before Christmas, series creators and stars James Corden and Ruth Jones were both emotional as they spoke about saying goodbye. This is a series that means so much to its cast and creators, as well as its millions of fans.

So. Seventeen years after that eventful first night in a central London hotel room (and en suite), one of the most beloved British comedies of all time has finally come to an end.

* Warning – some spoilers for Gavin & Stacey: The Finale ahead *

Gavin and Stacey are getting ready for a wedding. There is talk of suit fittings and bridesmaids and Smithy standing at the end of the aisle.

It’s the night before the stag and the hen dos, an occasion in itself, and in Essex, Gavin’s mum Pam is stressing about the “flow of the buffet”. Dad Mick is now retired, so her home, her sanctuary, is filled with golf balls and “Sky Sports blasting”. In Wales, Stacey’s mum Gwen appears to have a secret and Uncle Bryn is worrying about his roof rack and whether everyone will be ready to hit the road in three hours and 11 minutes.

So it seems Smithy did indeed say yes. Hurrah! But does this all feel a bit too easy? In John Lewis for official wedding list business, we finally catch a glimpse of his bride-to-be.

And… she isn’t Nessa. She is, in fact, Sonia, the girlfriend he fleetingly introduced five years ago, who left the 2019 Christmas celebrations early. Back then, they didn’t appear to be a match made in heaven. Have things changed?

“I’m so excited,” Sonia tells her fiance. “Somebody’s already bought the handheld Dyson.”

Smithy is more concerned about his stag – “the most important day of my life”.

Elsewhere, Stacey is keen to spice up hers and Gavin’s sex life, Dawn and Pete have finally ended their marriage (but not their sniping), and Nessa and Smithy’s son, Neil the Baby, is now 16 and about to start a plumbing course.

Over the course of an hour-and-a-half, we find out what happened five years ago and what Smithy did, or didn’t, say to Nessa. In a turn of events no one was expecting, there was Cossack dancing involved. Now, she wants to bail on Sonia’s hen do – “full Gareth” – and later reminds Smithy she won’t be at the wedding itself, but not because she has other plans. “We both knows that.”

As the families and friends are reuniting for a wedding, the finale is filled with familiar faces: Budgie and co are back (of course, when there’s a stag do involved), Smithy’s little sister makes an appearance, despite him blocking her on Snapchat, and Dave Coaches also has an unexpected new role…

We also hear more celebrity anecdotes from Nessa – she “done The Knowledge back in the day” and drove a black cab, which is how she “fell in with Hale and Pace” – and jokes referencing everything from Byker Grove to Baby Reindeer.

And of course, the infamous fishing trip. The finale gets tantalisingly close to revealing what happened, but Bryn is saved by the bell; or in this case, Gwen’s omelette and a fire alarm.

As always, the laughs and emotion are perfectly balanced, with one particularly lovely moment coming from Mick’s stag-do speech. He and Pam weren’t able to have another child after Gavin, he tells the boys, but when a seven-year-old Smithy came into their lives, “it didn’t feel like there was anything missing anymore”. There’s no time to get too sentimental though – not when there’s a foam party on the horizon.

As the big day approaches, Smithy’s friends start to voice their doubts. We see he still has Nessa’s ring. But she’s thinking of leaving Barry and returning to the ships…

At the preview screening, Corden and Jones were joined by castmates, who all shared their experiences of filming the final scenes.

“I remember just getting to the end and thinking, my God, I’m never going to get through that,” said Joanna Page, who plays Stacey, of the first time she read the script. I [knew I was] going to find that so hard to film because they’re all my friends and it’s such memories.”

Larry Lamb, who plays Mick, described the script as “another miracle from the dream weavers” Corden and Jones, and became emotional as he added: “I do not think I can ever remember being so moved by something either that I’ve been involved with or not involved with.”

Alison Steadman, who plays Pam, said she was “completely choked” watching the episode back. “It’s been one of the best jobs of my whole career,” she said. And it was never hard, she added, for her and Lamb to feel “like husband and wife”.

Up there with presents, turkey and Wham!, Christmas TV specials are as much a part of the UK’s annual traditions come 25 December. The best, from the soap drama of EastEnders and Coronation Street to the comedy of The Royle Family and The Office, are always remembered.

In saying goodbye to Gavin and Stacey, Nessa and Smithy, Corden and Jones have left fans with a pretty much perfect ending. Tears, laughs, joy – it has it all.

The finale sums up what is at heart a show about family, the one we are born into and the one we build. Gavin & Stacey is loved because it is so relatable, particularly at Christmas, capturing so well those wonderful snapshots of life spent with very different friends and relatives, whose paths otherwise might not cross.

“You just want it to feel satisfying,” Corden said of the ending. The last day in particular, he said, “was probably the most emotional film set that I’ve ever been on”.

Expectations around a final episode for a show as big as this one are always high. Get it wrong, and you might end up with a petition on your hands.

Did Corden and Jones pull it off?

Let’s just say it was crackin’. Truth be told.

Richard Perry, a hitmaking record producer who worked with Carly Simon, Rod Stewart, Ringo Starr and the Beatles, has died aged 82.

Perry, a recipient of a Grammys Trustee Award in 2015, died on Tuesday at a Los Angeles hospital after suffering cardiac arrest, friend Daphna Kastner said.

“He maximised his time here,” said Ms Kastner, who called him a “father friend” and said he was godfather to her son.

“He was generous, fun, sweet and made the world a better place. The world is a little less sweeter without him here. But it’s a little bit sweeter in heaven.”

Perry, who dated celebrities such as Jane Fonda and Elizabeth Taylor, was widely known as a “musician’s producer”.

Singers turned to him for a variety of reasons, including to try to update their sound, as in Barbra Streisand’s case, or to revive their career, like for Fats Domino.

“Richard had a knack for matching the right song to the right artist,” Streisand wrote in her 2023 memoir, My Name is Barbra.

Starr’s album Ringo, released in 1973, would prove the drummer was a commercial force in his own right.

The album featured work from the other three Beatles as well as contributions from Harry Nilsson, Billy Preston, Steve Cropper, Martha Reeves and all five members of The Band.

It reached No. 2 on Billboard and sold more than 1m copies.

Hit singles included the chart toppers Photograph, co-written by Starr and George Harrison, and a remake of the 1950s favourite You’re Sixteen.

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I’m the Greatest was another memorable track on the album as, thanks to Perry’s help, Starr, Lennon and Harrison came together for a near-total Beatles reunion just three years after the band’s break-up.

Perry was briefly married to the actor Rebecca Broussard.