James Corden and Ruth Jones left hotel room in 'disastrous' state when writing Gavin and Stacey

Gavin and Stacey returned for one final time this festive season with James Corden and Ruth Jones penning the script for the hotly-anticipated special in a very unusual way

James Corden has spilled the beans on the rather unusual creative process that went into this year's Gavin and Stacey Christmas special.

Fans were thrilled to see the actor and his fellow cast members return for one last hurrah in Gavin and Stacey: The Finale on BBC One.

The festive episode was a labour of love, with 18 months of meticulous planning. James has now revealed that he and co-writer Ruth Jones spent countless days holed up in hotels, hammering out the script for the eagerly awaited special.

During a chat with Jordan North, Chris Stark and Sian Welby on the Capital FM Breakfast Show, James and Ruth shared how their writing marathons were powered by copious amounts of chocolate buttons in a Heathrow Airport hotel. James told the radio hosts: "There's a lot of hotel rooms we've written in."

Ruth then chimed in with a tale of their dedication: "One of the particularly exotic ones was I was up in Scotland last year and we only had kind of like a day that we could both write, and we had to make the most of any time that we had so I flew down to Heathrow from Inverness."

James recounted: "I got the Heathrow Express out and we wrote for a day in a hotel next to the runway and it wasn't our most productive day, was it? Looking back now it feels like a mistake but at the time we were so close to getting it done we were just like let's just try and get it there. We often try and write between like six and ten pages a day when we write and that day, I think we wrote a page and a half."

Presenter Chris then probed whether they used "post-it notes" as part of their scripting strategy. "We're not very grown-up in that regard." Admitting that their hotel writing rooms looked like a "disaster".

James confessed: "I often say if somebody walked past the window and looked in at Ruth and I, what they would see is two people more than likely having a nap, two open bags of like chocolate buttons, randomly placed post-its on a wall and you would look in an you would never ever think 'oh they must be writing a successful hit show. You'd be thinking 'that looks like a disaster."

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