‘Gavin & Stacey,’ ‘Wallace & Gromit’ and King Charles Top U.K. Christmas Day Ratings

“Gavin & Stacey: The Finale” proved a winner for the BBC in the U.K. Christmas Day ratings battle.

The long-awaited 90-minute special, which was written and exec produced by stars James Corden and Ruth Jones, pulled in 12.3 million viewers, equating to a 64.75% audience share, according to monitoring agency Overnights.TV.

Reviewers were also won over, with The Guardian calling it “a beautiful, poignant piece of television” while The Times of London’s reviewer gushed: “It is rare to get a communal ‘TV event’ these days but this felt like one. I doubt they could have ended it much better.”

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Created by Corden and Jones, “Gavin & Stacey” first aired in 2007, running for three seasons until 2010 and becoming a cult hit. A Christmas Day special aired in 2019 and fans have repeatedly asked Corden — who until last year was busy hosting CBS’s “The Late Late Show” — when it would be returning for another outing.

The special was comfortably ahead of the next most-watched show, “Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl,” which boasted 9.4 million viewers and a 53.07% of the audience share. The stop-motion film, which was also broadcast on the BBC, is Aardman Animation’s second feature-length movie after 2005’s “Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit.” It will hit Netflix on Jan. 3.

Meanwhile around 5 million people (44.8% of the audience) tuned in to watch King Charles II deliver his third annual Christmas speech, which was filmed in London’s Fitzrovia Chapel – rather than the traditional venue of a royal residence – earlier this month. In his speech the King reflected on the challenges faced by a rocky geo-political climate as well as those he and his family have undergone recently, with both Charles and his daughter-in-law Catherine, the Princess of Wales, having been diagnosed with cancer at the start of this year. Last month his wife, Queen Camilla, fell ill with a chest infection, requiring her to cancel a number of events while his daughter Princess Anne was hospitalized over the summer after being injured by a horse.

“All of us go through some form of suffering at some stage in our life, be it mental or physical,” the King said in his speech. “The degree to which we help one another – and draw support from each other, be we people of faith or of none – is a measure of our civilisation as nations.”