Car Share is back (HURRAH!!) but it is the finale (BOOO!!!).    If you remember the last series ended with John and Kayleigh not getting together; cue national outpouring of grief. “How could he leave us like this?  We want a happy ending!”  The cynics may say that this ending left it more open for a third series, but Peter Kay was quite adamant that he was stopping after series 2.  Perhaps he just couldn’t decide what to do.

So this week we had the definitive finale to the series.  The BBC has been repeating series 2 in the run up to the finale, so prior to the last ever episode we were treated to John and Kayleigh dueting on Billy Ocean’s “Red Light Spells Danger”, one of the best feel good songs of all time, before Kayleigh storming out of the car. The finale began with John delivering a package to Kayleigh’s house.  He left it with her brother in law Guy Garvey.  This still has to be one of the weirdest castings ever.  I reckon it was done as a favour to a mate.  Luckily he kept him down to just the 6 lines of dialogue.  The package contained an old school cassette Walkman with a song from John singing about wanting Kayleigh back.  Cue Peter Kay the pop star.

There pop video element was somewhat lacking in series 2, but he bought it back with vengeance in the finale inserting himself in the role of Gary Barlow in the Take That Back for Good video.  I don’t think Peter Kay makes any secret of the fact that he wants to be a pop star.  Not necessarily a singer (although he can hold a tune) just a pop star.  Come on, the man has had a number one with Tony Christie which he didn’t even sing on!  So in this finale, he finally made it into Britain’s biggest boy band ever (if you exclude East 17, obvs).

From this point it was business as usual with the two of them back in the car bitching, flirting and generally doing what co-workers do.  The wedding invite scene was the show stealer.  You could hear thousands of wood be brides ripping open their pile of invites ready for the post to remove the glitter, feathers and poems.  Oh yes.  No bride will include a poem in their invite for a good few years after that scene.  As well as this there was the usual cut away scenes of the car driving all over Greater Manchester with the usual spoof signs (all of which can be seen here).

The finale of the finale was John’s car getting trashed and them ending up on the bus.  Not wanting to give the public precisely what they want, we assume they now together, but there was no “kiss on the balcony” so to speak.  I think that would be too on the nose for Peter Kay.  What he has manged to do in 12 episodes though is create a classic akin to Fawlty Towers and knowing Peter Kay he will get “Red Light Spell Danger” back into the charts as a duet with Billy Ocean, but without Peter singing a single note.

All episodes of Car Share are available on iPlayer.