dinnerladies (1998)

The sitcom where she kept one regular cast across two series, and the best place to fall in love with her writing. Sixteen half-hour episodes on BBC One between 1998 and 2000, almost all in the canteen of a Manchester factory, on one set, in front of a live audience. Wood plays Bren, the kind deputy manager who scrambles for words and lands on the wrong ones, alongside Thelma Barlow, Anne Reid, Celia Imrie, Maxine Peake, Shobna Gulati, Andrew Dunn and Duncan Preston, with Julie Walters as Bren's dreadful mother Petula. The comedy is all talk, overlapping and precise, and it makes room for real sadness too. It won Best New TV Comedy at the 1999 British Comedy Awards and placed 28th in the BBC's Britain's Best Sitcom poll in 2004.