This Christmas, Gavin and Stacey fans are in for a real treat, with the eagerly-awaited finale of the iconic ’00s-era sitcom guaranteed to bring families together on the sofa. And many will be particularly looking forward to catching up with excitable Uncle Bryn.
Played by Rob Brydon, cheerful Bryn never fails to make viewers smile with his enthusiasm for everything from Sat Nav of his trusty Citroen Xsara Picasso to Mint Baileys. Just don’t ask him about that fishing trip.
Behind the scenes, however, actor Rob, 59, has nursed an agonising heartbreak with a traumatic divorce plunging him into a deep depression.
As Gavin and Stacey fans say one final ‘What’s occurin’?’ to Bryn and the gang, the Mirror takes a look at Glamorgan-born Rob’s devastating split, which left him feeling “lost”.
Rob divorced his first wife, Martina Fitchie, in 2001, after nine years of marriage, in what is understood to have been a “mutual” yet “traumatic” decision. The Would I Lie to You host first locked eyes with Martina in a Cardiff pub back when he was working at Radio Wales alongside Martina’s producer sister.
After making the move to London, comedian Rob’s acting career skyrocketed, while Martina found work as a nanny. They went on to raise a family together, welcoming their three children Katie, 30, Amy, 25, and Harry, 28. The breakdown of his marriage “traumatised” Rob, so much so that he couldn’t even write about the sensitive topic in his autobiography.
It wasn’t until 16 years later that Rob decided to open up about the painful split in an interview with The Times, where he explained that their relationship “just came to an end”. Rob confessed: “You lose excitement with marriage. […] You can’t have everything, though.”
The TV star shared how he’d felt “derailed” and “lost” in the aftermath of his divorce, becoming depressed and seeing his weight plummet. He said: “I’d been married, with three children, then that goes. All the stage posts in your life, the boundaries that there are, they vanish.”
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Rob and Martina deliberately played down the split in public to avoid any “awkward questions”, and eventually, the comic learnt to “live with it”. A doting dad, Rob also dedicated himself to ensuring their children weren’t affected by the upheaval.
He reflected: “I’d love to know what could be more traumatic than divorce. We both wanted it to happen. We had three children, so of course, I looked on it as a bloody failure, but I have friends who’ve been through divorces that make my miraculous hair curl.”
Martina has since moved on with a new partner, and she joined Rob and their children in Australia a few years ago when he was performing out there, and the family went dolphin-watching.
Rob has moved on too, finding happiness with his second wife, TV producer Clare Holland, with whom he had two more children – Tom, 16, and George, 13. He and Clare met at the South Bank Awards in 2002 and got married in 2006. They now reside in South West London together.
In an interview with the Daily Mail back when his youngest was just two, Rob admitted that he never used to want children, but the feeling slowly developed as he got older. Rob divulged: “For a man of my age, my kids are young. As they get older and start going off and doing their own thing, I find I’m happiest at big family occasions when everyone is there.”
Rob opened up about the return of Gavin & Stacey during an appearance on The Zoe Ball Breakfast Show over the summer, sharing that he was hoping for “more of the same” when it came to Uncle Bryn. He told Zoe: I mean, I always love it [when] I get the script, and on the last on,e I go through the script, and there’s that great speech about the woman he met at the service station, and she’d lost her wallet and needed to buy a phone, and he’s so gullible, so that’s lovely to play cause the words are just beautiful and it’s a gorgeous script.
“And then you get to play that and I was playing it to the rest of the cast because we were all [filming] at the pub. They’re all sat there. So you’re looking at the other components, then. You can see Mathew Horne [who played Gavin Shipman]… y’know how he does those great reaction shots! […] I don’t have a thing that I hope … ‘oh I hope y’know they do this or that’. I can’t wait to read it and see what they have done.”
Zoe then asked: “Will we ever find out what happened on the fishing trip?”, to which Rob replied: “I hope not because I think it’s great that it’s this thing. I think it would be a mistake cause then people will stop asking [about it], won’t they?”
In a separate interview with Chris Evans on the DJ’s Breakfast Show, Rob admitted that he’d been “moved to tears” by the final “fantastic” script. Rob revealed: “It was a couple of months before the cast saw the script. I only saw it, we were on holiday, we were away, about a month ago. I read it. Oh, it’s so good.”
When teased by Chris about whether he had to say that, Rob insisted: “Do you know what? I was moved to tears, because it’s emotional.”
The finale of Gavin & Stacey will air Christmas Day 2024.
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