Larry Lamb: 'I miss Gavin & Stacey – but it's not up to me if we'll see Mick again'

I work in an interesting business. People think it’s about glitz and fame, but it’s not about that. It’s about how regular working people deal with situations – they do a job that from the outside appears glamorous, but most of the time is quite the opposite.

It’s not about red carpets; it’s about going out and doing a job and making a film. I wanted to celebrate that, so I wrote an adventure story set on a Caribbean island, all seen from the point of view of the first assistant director – who is really the central person on any film or television shoot, because they’re the one who deals with anything that goes wrong through the course of a shoot.

It’s not about the actors, it’s about the people who pull together to get the film made. Sorry, that was a bit of a long sentence – as I read the book back to myself, I thought: "Wow, you write some long sentences!"

There are some fairly short and, ahem, "pithy" sentences too…

Well, you’ve got to be true to your subject, right? There is plenty of tough, fruity language, but it’s not coarse, it’s witty. And it’s the women as much as the men, and the middle class as much as anyone else. I know a lot of middle-class families who are far more foul-mouthed than I am! And All Wrapped Up is about the real-life people doing extraordinary work.

As a film or TV actor, the first time you meet your co-actors is at the read-through, and you might not see them again until you all get together to watch the film. But the people you see every single day are the crew: they meet you as you arrive, they put you in your caravan, they put you in your costume, they get your makeup done, they get you a cup of tea – they’re the ones that become your family.

So it’s the crew who have all the juicy stories about Larry Lamb being a real diva?

You do hear a bit of that stuff from them! They certainly know where the bodies are buried, so if there are actors who aren’t nice to work with, word gets around very quickly. They don’t suffer fools gladly, but as long as you don’t get too fond of yourself, you’re going to have a good time with them.

There’s a bond, and they’re not going to go blabbing your secrets around. The difficulty is when you’re playing a villain, like Archie in EastEnders: the process of getting a character on film is so intense that you can’t be drawn off; you’re really focused and can’t really get involved with other people.

And are the characters in the book based on real people? Is that difficult leading man James Corden, for instance?

No, quite the opposite! There are parts of some characters that are very definitely based on factual individuals, but they’re all mixed up with elements of my imagination. Writing was like an ongoing improvisation session: the characters wrote themselves!

It feels like there’s a bit of your Gavin & Stacey character, Mick Shipman, in the book’s hero, Killy…

There’s a streak of Mick in him: he’s a regular working guy who’s gained respect because of situations he’s had to sort out, and he’s there making sure everything rolls along smoothly. But there’s a bit of Mick in me too now. Playing Mick made me a much more bearable person! He’s level-headed, straightforward, a problem-solver, and I’ve taken that from him. Mick has made me understand that you’ve got to take the rough with the smooth, so I’m more calm now. That goes well with my age, too: you think, “I’m pushing 80, I need to calm down!”

You could always stick him in your next novel though, right?

I miss Mick, I miss Pam, I miss the whole thing. Alison [Steadman, who played Mick’s wife Pam] lives not ten minutes’ walk from me, but we very rarely see each other. The minute we do, though, the whole thing just picks up and we’re back, we have that relationship again – she and I will always have that. So there’s a kind of sadness that it’s finished. But write my own Mick Shipman story? No, no, no, no, no – they [show writers Corden and Ruth Jones] created that. That’s their world.

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