ARTICLE AD BOX
Larry Lamb is sad but relieved Gavin & Stacey has finished.
The actor who played Mick Shipman, Gavin’s dad, in the popular TV series, thinks the story of a girl from south Wales and a boy from Essex who fall in love, and the relationships that evolve between their friends and family, was aptly completed in the finale on Christmas Day last year.
“In a funny, sad sort of way I’m relieved that it’s finished because in the end people were desperate to see the end of it, and then to know that the whole thing’s all been wrapped up, the story’s told, and it’s had its life.
“You know, that’s what I like about it – we can all sit back and say this is a completed story.”
And one completed story has swiftly led to another for Lamb, 77, who’s used his time away from stage and screen to write his first novel, All Wrapped Up. And although becoming an author isn’t the form of creativity Lamb has excelled at for half a century, his book’s subject matter hasn’t strayed far from what he knows and loves, as it’s centred round an inside look at the film industry.
The novel tells the story of a first assistant director and his crew battling to stop their film production falling apart as they endure a series of problems including power struggles on and off set, and a crew member mysteriously vanishing.
“It’s a way of telling people what my life is all about,” says Lamb. “The thing that interests me most is the camaraderie among the teams that make films. So I made it an adventure story set behind the scenes on a film in the Caribbean – it’s the book I always knew I wanted to write.”
He explains that years ago he did an acting job in the Caribbean, and before the end things started to go wrong. “So I had the feeling of how I’d set it,” he says. “What I wanted to do was show that the film and television businesses aren’t all about the actors. It’s all about the people that go in every day to do a job.
“They make the films, they’re the ones that really get stuck in all the time, and they work on every single scene that’s on the screen and every single scene that isn’t on the screen. When I was working on Gavin & Stacey, you get so close to the crew, and the crew get so close to you.
“You can be working on a job with actors who you never really see, but you’ll see the crew every day. They really are the unsung heroes – but they’re not qualified as heroes, they’re just regular working people doing a job, and they’re the people I really, really love.”
Lamb, who’s also well-known for playing Archie Mitchell in EastEnders, says he was very disciplined about writing the book, penning at least 1,000 words a day over a 14-week period. And as well as writing about an industry he knows so well, some of the people in the book are also based on characters he knows.
“Characters come out from somebody in your past, maybe somebody you’ve worked with,” he explains. “The production manager in the book is a Spanish woman called Monica, and she’s a very strong character who’s always looking after everybody. And while she’s about six foot tall, her character is Peggy Mitchell from EastEnders. That’s who I drew the character from – somebody who always wanted to get everybody looked after, who always insisted on everybody working as a team.”
And he says he’s tried to include elements of Gavin & Stacey’s winning formula in his writing too.
“Gavin and Stacey was about love – a normal, loving family, and I’ve tried to instil that in my book, that sense of being a community. Everybody is attached to each other, you all help each other, and if anything goes wrong, you all work to pull through. It’s come off that feeling of all those years of working with those people together, and then taking bits of it and putting it into the book.”
So does he plan to write more novels?
“I’m sure there’s a lot more in me,” he declares, stressing that any further books will definitely be tales from behind-the-scenes of the film industry. “It’s what I know about – I spent 50 years in it and understand what it is about it that I really like. It’s about love and hate and dramas and relationships and intensities. It’s about people making mistakes and then putting them right. It’s about living right on the edge a lot of the time, and it’s just like regular people doing their jobs.
“It’s me illustrating for people that do regular jobs that this is another way of earning a living, and I find it deeply, deeply fascinating.”
Lamb agrees that his novel new career direction is very solitary compared to acting, but he points out that there are solitary elements to the thespian world too, explaining: “A lot of the time that you’re preparing for an acting job you spend on your own. You’re learning lines, you’re practising what you’re going to be doing. It’s not always a group thing – you travel to jobs on your own, you stay somewhere on your own. There’s definitely a solitary element to it as well.”
Although Lamb says he enjoys writing, fans of his acting need not worry, as he already has roles in the pipeline, and certainly has no plans to retire, or even take it easy.
“No point, is there?” he insists. “I’d be sitting around wondering what to do. I’ve just got to keep myself busy, and acting has been a big part of my life.”
Recent media reports have suggested Lamb may have proposed a Gavin & Stacey film to BBC director general Tim Davie. But although he says he did indeed mention putting Gavin & Stacey in cinemas to Davie, he didn’t mean a whole new film.
“That’s me saying to Tim Davie that someone had suggested to me they should just take what we’ve done, the finale, and put it out in the cinemas,” he explains. “There was never any mention of making a film – there’s no more film to be made.”
All Wrapped Up by Larry Lamb is published by Softwood Books, priced £9.99. Available now.
English (US) ·