COMEDY

Dinnerladies Thursdays BBC1

Dinner ladies is served

"Sometimes you’ll get a load of screaming queens, and sometimes you’ll get a load of OAPs from Purley"

"There’s no guarantee what you’ll get," says Victoria Wood, dabbling with a bowl of leek and potato soup in a café in south London. "Sometimes you’ll get a load of screaming queens, and sometimes you’ll get a load of OAPs from Purley." It’s her lunch break on Thursday, towards the end of the week-long rehearsal period required for each episode of Dinnerladies. They will record the show tomorrow night and, uniquely among British sitcoms, again on Saturday night. Allowing the cast two shots at each episode gives them every chance of matching the performances to Wood’s perfectionism over the words. But the one variable over which nobody has any control is the composition of the audience. On Friday night, it turns out that the queue in the rain outside BBC Television Centre is highly varied. The breadth of Wood’s appeal is such that she somehow speaks to all constituencies.

It will come as no surprise to Wood-watchers that this second series of the factory-canteen sitcom (which attracted more than nine million viewers to its first series last year) is also the last. When we meet, she is about to go home to write the final few scenes of the concluding episode. "I’m not going to do another one," she says. "I don’t normally do anything twice. But I felt for this to give it its best benefit I had to do more. The first six were like an experiment. You don’t know what you’ve done till you’ve had it out on the television. Now I can go back and write this series. Now I understand what people taken from it, what I need to change in it, how I can improve it and deepen it and extend it. But I’ve done what I wanted to do with them now." You can understand her strategic thinking. "How many episodes was Fawlty Towers?" she asks me. (Twelve.) The road to the sitcom hall of fame is littered with the corpses of comedies that outstayed their welcome. Dinnerladies aspires to like all those programmes that the dinnerladies talk about so fondly in the episode I watched – Crossroads, Upstairs, Downstairs, All Creatures Great and Small. Even the younger actresses whose big break Dinnerladies represents understand that the best career move may be a sharp exit. "I am quite relieved in a strange way," says Maxine Peake, who was cast as the sluttish Twinkle straight out of Rada. "I think it’s time to go. With any good comedy you should nip things in the bud early, and it’s nice while I’m still young not to get tempted to get stuck."

Stand-up comic: Victoria Wood warms up the audience at London's TV centre before giving them another helping of sitcom

The consolation is that at least there will be ten episodes in this series, making 16 in all. That’s still about ten fewer than a single series of a top American sitcom. But then, for all the rehearsals and double recording, Dinnerladies has precious little in common with Friends and Frasier. In the pithy phrase of the show’s producer/director Geoff Posner, American sitcoms are written by "20 Jews in a room". With Wood’s, it’s a case of the loneliness of the long-distance writer. She has been working on Dinnerladies on her own all year, storyboarding the ever-shifting plotlines on a magnetic wall chart. She is so tired that the day before she almost missed her stop on the Tube. "She’s always been that way," says Posner. "Much to the frustration of a lot of people who work round her, she creates everything and you just wait for the next thing to come out."

"I do get very lonely and nearly jacked it in in about April. I thought it was very bad and I couldn’t write comedy"

She almost came down from the mountain empty-handed. "I do get very lonely and I nearly jacked it in in about April. I thought it was very bad and I couldn’t write comedy any more. It’s not so much that ten is so many, but when you rewrite ten that’s 20 and then 30 and 40. I’ve done at least 60 or 70 half-hour scripts. I’m getting a bit fed up with it. I felt it was too much for me to think about all on my own. About halfway through I just wished I had one other person that knew everything I was doing that I could talk to about it. I wish I had somebody like Woody Allen does when he walks through the streets of New York saying, ‘What about this, what about that?’"

Each draft takes her about 12 hours, but even once filming begins, she is under the bonnet, tweaking and fine-tuning. When Maxine Peake turned up for the first day of rehearsal for series two, she had lost so much weight that Wood was obliged to acknowledge her transformation in the script. "She is so inventive, with a really quick brain," says Thelma Barlow, for whom Wood wrote the part of the prudish Dolly when she heard that Barlow was about to leave Coronation Street. "She will Just go home and write a scene and make it twice as funny as it was before rewriting."

The rehearsal room is a huge space with a low ceiling. On the replica set, the work surfaces and kitchen appliances have been re-created with tables and cardboard boxes marked "toaster" and "dish wash". Posner stands at a desk where the central camera would be, while the stage manager wheels her script around on a gleaming dinner trolley. Offstage right is a milling area for the cast, a mix of newcomers, alumni of the Street and the usual smattering of "old lags", to use Wood’s phrase, such as Celia Imrie and Duncan Preston.

The thing you notice, as you listen repeatedly to the cast saying their lines, is how taut the script is. There is probably a greater density of words per minute in Dinnerladies than in any other sitcom, but each of them has been chosen with precision. Like Alan Bennett, Wood is tuned to the northerner’s pickiness with vocabulary, and her scripts take on that fastidiousness. "Her choice of words is very funny," says lmrie, who plays Philippa from Human Resources, a southerner who is less linguistically precise than most of the cast, "and the order in which they’re written. And they’re not if you make a mistake." The characters chatter at cross-purposes, creating a quilted dialogue that is technically hard to master. It’s not easy stuff to do, says Anne Reid who plays the world-weary Jean. "You have to be very sharp, you have to stay alert, because Victoria likes you to be very quick."

By Friday night, after endless rehearsals for cast and, latterly, crew, mistakes have been mostly ironed out. Wood bounces in and does her own hugely droll warm-up act, most of which she dreamt up over egg and chips in the 45-minute break at 6pm. ‘‘That’s a very nice sleeveless pully," she says to one of a bunch of latecomers taking their seats. "Are you all from a catalogue?"

When mistakes do happen, they are the result of nerves. Maxine Peake forgets a line and Wood, pointing extravagantly at the show’s junior star, says, "Don’t go to Rada." Later, When Imrie twice gets her boyfriend’s name wrong, Wood very generously keeps her company by getting hers wrong, too. And yet nerves are what give the show its edge. "That’s why I act," says Shobna Gulati, who plays the sweetly gormless Anita. "That feeling of being unsteady just before you go out is Just fantastic. That’s what feeds you. The fear, the excitement and the challenge and dying to go to the toilet all at the same time – it’s wonderful, better than sex.

Perhaps that’s another of the reasons why Wood is giving up on Dinnerladies. It’s my guess that there’s part of her which finds the unpredictability of the audience infuriating – their laughs can upset the timing of the show, swallow lines, and appear or disappear in unlooked-for places. And yet she says, "We can’t do it without them. I’ve done things without them and they are just deadly. I did a whole series without them once and it was just so dull. But I think the sitcom in front of the audience is dead. People will get used to the canned laughter and that filmed, single-camera look."

By the end of the Friday recording Wood is more or less in tears. She plays the down-to-earth Bren, who at the climax of the episode has a chance of happiness whipped from under her nose. There’s a sharp intake of collective breath. "I never mean to do pathos," she had said over her soup the day before, "but I can’t seem to avoid it." This time round, in other words, Dinnerladies will be deeper and richer and darker: more mature. And even though it belongs to an endangered species, she is still giving it all up. "Don’t," she says. "Don’t make me change my mind."

... AND SERVE The audience finally gets to see the episode when recording begins at BBC Television Centre

RT SHOP To celebrate the new series of Dinnerladies, the entire first series of Victoria Wood’s hit BBC sitcom is available, on two videos, for only £23.99 (normally £25.98) plus P&P. Set in a factory canteen, it stars the author, along with Julie Waiters and Celia Imrie. To order these videos, call 01733 230500 or send a cheque, payable to RT Shop, to Radio Times Dinnerladies Offer, PO Box 190, Peterborough PE2 6UW. Quote RADT9013 and add £2.95 P&P per order. Closing date: 31 December 1999

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RadioTimes 20–26 November 1999