Gavin & Stacey star Larry Lamb, 77, goes shirtless in navy swim shorts as he braves a chilly dip in the sea at Tynemouth beach
Gavin & Stacey star Larry Lamb went shirtless in navy swim shorts as he braved a chilly dip in the sea at Tynemouth beach on Thursday.
The actor, 77, proved age is just a number as he took a bracing early morning swim in the North Sea.
Larry arrived by taxi at the beach just before 8am, where he wasted no time stripping off and heading straight for the water.
Onlookers were stunned as Larry swam confidently in the chilly sea for nearly 40 minutes, emerging refreshed and beaming as he dried off.
One witness said, 'He looked totally at ease - like it was just another morning routine. Fair play to him!'
Larry is best known for his role in the now concluded sitcom where he plays the lovable Mick Shipman.
His trip to Newcastle comes after last month Larry revealed that two actors objected to Smithy and Sonia getting married during Gavin and Stacey's Christmas special and stormed off the set during filming.
He confessed that the scene of the famed final episode caused huge upset with unknowing extras who did not know what to do with the news.
Speaking on The Chris Evans Breakfast Show, Larry explained the two actors 'had enough' and 'thought no he shouldn't'.
He told Chris: 'When you're doing film and television it's all according to locations it's not at all according the clock or the calendar.
'So you can do jobs where you do the end on the first day because they could only get that location for that day but this they'd engineered it so we were going to be filming the last day on the last day, which was extraordinary, just amazing, but you still had to go through it and it got really, really emotional.'
To which Chris replied: 'Of course you knew it was coming because you read the script 10 months ago, but your character can't know it's coming because that's not what happened.
Larry said: 'You've got to live with it and watch all the extras sitting in the wedding scene, watching their faces because they didn't know anything about this.
'They're in there watching a wedding and all and so it's like, "what's going on here? Do we laugh? Do we cry? What are we supposed to do?"
'And they asked for people to stand up, two of the extras at the back, they just got up, they'd had enough, they thought, "no, he shouldn't". That was never written, they just thought, "no he shouldn't".'
The Christmas special and finale came five years after the show's last Christmas instalment in 2019.
It was hailed 'perfect' by viewers, who were left in tears as the long-running show finally aired its last episode after 17 years.
While fans tuned into the episode to see whether Smithy had accepted Nessa's proposal from the 2019 Christmas Special, a five-year time jump revealed that he was indeed set to tie the knot, but all was not as it seemed.
It was revealed that Smithy had instead got engaged to his girlfriend Sonia, who failed to impress the Shipman/West clan when she met them in the last festive episode.
Fans were also treated to the surprise return of Sheridan Smith as Smithy's sister Rudi, and Pam Ferris as his mum Cath.
It was hailed 'perfect' by viewers, who were left in tears as the long-running show finally aired its last episode after 17 years
Yet when it came to Smithy's big day he realised that Nessa was his one true love and called off the wedding.
The entire family jumped into Dave's coach and rushed to Southampton, where Nessa was preparing to set sail, and in a scene 17 years in the making, he declared his love for her, and asked her to reconsider leaving.
While an ever-stoic Nessa insisted she wouldn't propose to Smithy again, instead he returned her offer from five years earlier, finally getting down on one knee and asking her to marry him.
The episode then cut to Smithy and Nessa exchanging their vows at long last in an intimate ceremony in Barry, with the series ending with an emotional montage of the family marking the occasion at The Dolphin pub, before posing for a family snap together.
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