What’s occurrin’? Gavin & Stacey has breathed new life into my hometown

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/dec/25/gavin-stacey-whats-occurrin-barry

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The Barry I grew up in was a far cry from its peak as a thriving coal port then a holiday destination. It took an unassuming sitcom to give it a lifeline

You know a town has a PR problem when it needs to catch fire to get attention. In 1984, my home town of Barry made the evening news when the Dock Offices caught fire. Even without the TV coverage, I could see the blaze from my bedroom window. I don’t recall my exact reaction to the spectacle, but one thing I definitely didn’t say was “What’s occurin’?”: because that piece of famous Barry parlance wouldn’t be invented for almost 20 years.

As the cameras captured the flames flickering around the nearby statue of industrialist David Davies, Barry’s own Jebediah Springfield, it seemed symbolic. It was Davies who, spurred on by a grudge against rival coal magnates from nearby Cardiff, turned Barry from a few scattered cottages into a thriving dock town. By 1913, it was the biggest coal-exporting port in the world. For most of the 20th century, however, it languished in near-anonymity.

All of that changed in 2007 when Gavin & Stacey first aired on the BBC. The warm-hearted sitcom, written by and starring Ruth Jones and James Corden, became a sleeper success, spawning spin-off charity singles and foreign adaptations, and propelling Corden towards Hollywood. A Christmas special in 2019 pulled in 18 million viewers, and this year’s feature-length finale looks set to exceed that.

To an expat accustomed to invisibility, the sight of the opening credits was surreal – you can literally see the end of my road. Every day as a child I cycled up Trinity St, where Stacey West and her family live, handlebars wobbling against the insane gradient. Suddenly, Barry existed. If I speak to an English person now, they know exactly where Barry is: two of the first 10 words they utter will be “Stacey” and “Gavin”. For that, Barrians have been overwhelmingly grateful.

And it is no surprise that seaside traders at Barry Island leapt eagerly upon the Gavin & Stacey connection. Marco’s cafe, a filming location, erected wooden cutouts of the cast for fans to pose with. SH Amusements, where Jones’s Nessa works as a cashier (and where I spent one summer as a bingo caller), was renamed Nessa’s Slots. Bus trips, craftily branded Dave’s Coaches after a character in the show, were packed. Tourist shops on Paget Road still do a decent trade in tea towels, T-shirts and shot glasses bearing Nessa’s likeness and her catchphrases “Oh!” and “What’s occurrin’?”. Gavin & Stacey isn’t the only hit show made in Barry – much of Being Human was filmed there – but, with all due respect, nobody’s selling Russell Tovey tea towels.

The show is not beyond criticism. Some locals sense an element of Jones and co-star Rob Brydon, both raised in the posher resort of Porthcawl, poking fun at the coarser and more working-class Barry. Despite a scattering of affluent suburbs around its fringes, Barry retains a blue-collar flavour: the single biggest employer, on the edge of Palmerstown, is the dystopian Dow Chemicals plant (adding to the Springfield/Simpsons comparison).

There’s also the question of how accurately Gavin & Stacey depicts the town. Barrians are, for the most part, shown as cheerful, simple folk, happy with their lot. But what was their lot? For much of the postwar era, it’s been one of decline. By the time I was alive, Geest banana boats coming in were a more common sight than coal ships going out. The docks are now all but dead, and have been optimistically rebranded as a marina, while Holton Road, once a bustling retail centre, is now a grim wasteland of vape outlets and charity shops.

For a while, this slide was offset by tourism. At its height, photographers could take a snap of Barry Island on a summer’s day and not see an inch of sand for the teeming human bodies, lured by the Pleasure Park and, from 1966, Butlin’s. That trade, however, was hit by the rise of cheap foreign travel, and within 30 years Butlin’s was demolished, replaced by a residential estate. The Island has never really recovered. There have been cheerfully self-aware attempts to rebrand the town as “Barrybados”, but some more cynical locals, aware of its rough reputation, prefer “Basra”.

It was, in hindsight, a fine place to grow up, with plenty to do: a cinema, an annual carnival, even a pitch-and-putt golf course. But now where the Theatre Royal, Barry’s last cinema, once stood is a care home, the carnival was cancelled years ago and the pitch-and-putt has been rewilded. Rather than a lively port/resort, Barry is rapidly becoming a dormitory town. Only the flood-prone fields around Dinas Powys prevent it from being fully subsumed into Cardiff.

You wouldn’t know any of this from Gavin & Stacey. But, to be fair, that’s not its job, as a sitcom. And there are green shoots: Barry has gained its own local station, Bro Radio. There are festivals: Cadstock, Friendship Tree, and Glastonbarry. There’s even a Barry Pride. The Goodsheds development has delivered hipster-friendly boutiques, foodie joints and a vintage vinyl shop. Barry Town United, the fan-run phoenix club, is back in the Cymru Premier. Something, at last, is occurrin’.

By the end of Christmas Day, we’ll know whether Smithy said yes, and finally learn what happened on the fishing trip. What we won’t see, one suspects, is much about what’s happened in Barry since 2007. And that’s OK. Gavin & Stacey has put Barry on the map in a way that a burning Victorian building never could, and thrown the tourist industry a precious and enduring lifeline. We can all say diolch yn fawr for that.

Simon Price is a music journalist and author