Gavin & Stacey icon Joanna Page dishes on her new memoir Lush!: "That's really bad, I've sexualised Larry Lamb"

In the end – and in a nod to one of Stacey’s most repeated lines – Page has called her memoir Lush! It’s no less frank or relatable (or scatologically funny) for all that, though. “When I realised I was going to write a book,” she admits in the acknowledgements, “I got over-excited, thought I was Carrie Bradshaw from Sex and the City and went straight out to buy a handbag I could carry my notepad and pens in. Then I realised I was going to have to actually write the thing and s**t myself.”

It turns out she was right to panic, as producing a book when you’ve got four young children, four guinea pigs and two dogs to look after is no breeze.

“I’d go and sit in our garage to write, and my husband would be like, ‘I’ll look after all of them’ – but that apparently involves him popping in every five minutes to ask me something. So then I started going to car parks to write, just sitting there in my car trying to get it done in the middle of the night until I thought ‘This is getting a bit dodgy’ – or maybe a bit dogging-y – so I’d go back and park outside my own house, not daring to go inside in case I woke the kids, and keep writing in my car till five in the morning.”

Refreshingly for an actor’s autobiography, she’s just as candid about her career lows: lad-mag photographers getting her drunk for raunchy shoots, mendacious directors tricking her into sex scenes, a handsy TV presenter trying to feel her up on set (she won’t name him because “he’s not on telly any more. He got his comeuppance”).

And then there’s the story of missing out on a role, wandering the streets crying, retreating to a hotel where she “drank and drank and drank and said to my husband ‘I’m not coming back’. He phoned the hotel next morning – I think he thought I’d hanged myself because I was so low, and I thought, ‘I can’t carry on with this any more. I’m done.’ I went back to my job in a shoe shop and thought, ‘I’m happy with this.’

“Then two weeks later a script came in about a Welsh girl who falls in love with a boy from Essex, and it completely and utterly changed my life. It’s given me amazing opportunities, wonderful experiences and a whole new family.”

Gavin & Stacey may have robbed the world of an excellent shoe-shop assistant then, but Page isn’t exaggerating when she says it gave her – and, arguably, viewers – a whole new family.

Ruth Jones is like a sister to her (present the night before the birth of Page’s first child); James Corden, Mathew Horne and Rob Brydon like brothers (“Three naughty little brothers taking the piss out of you the whole time, thinking they’re a lot funnier than they are”); and Larry Lamb like… well, she describes him in the book as “very dishy”. So did she fancy him?

“Oh, God, when I re-read that I was thinking, ‘That’s really bad, I’ve sexualised Larry Lamb.’ But you can’t not do that because he’s so lovely. Out of all the stuff I’ve ever done in my career, the happiest my mother has ever been was when she came to a screening and got to meet Larry. She kissed him on the lips and I was like, ‘Mum, could you just calm down?’”

The G&S family is still together, it seems, even after the very final-feeling 2024 Christmas special (of which Page says, “I 100 per cent now think that is the end”). “We’ve got a WhatsApp group, called ‘Christmas is occurring’, and we send messages all the time. When Rob was doing Destination X, he’d send us photos and James would zoom into them and try and work out the locations. We’re always sending each other messages of support or arranging to see each other. And I’ve got a secret little chat with just me and Ruth, too.”

In fact, the only things she hasn’t shared with the gang are details of the new show she’s filming right now. “I’m too scared because the producers said to me, ‘You’re not allowed to say you’re on this or who you’re working with.’” There’s a 0.4-second pause, and then: “It’s not me acting, it’s not me hosting, it’s…”

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