Jump to content
Main menu
Main menu
move to sidebar
hide
Navigation
Main page
Recent changes
Random page
Help about MediaWiki
Special pages
Niidae Wiki
Search
Search
Appearance
Create account
Log in
Personal tools
Create account
Log in
Pages for logged out editors
learn more
Contributions
Talk
Editing
Dinnerladies (TV series)
(section)
Page
Discussion
English
Read
Edit
View history
Tools
Tools
move to sidebar
hide
Actions
Read
Edit
View history
General
What links here
Related changes
Page information
Appearance
move to sidebar
hide
Warning:
You are not logged in. Your IP address will be publicly visible if you make any edits. If you
log in
or
create an account
, your edits will be attributed to your username, along with other benefits.
Anti-spam check. Do
not
fill this in!
===Main=== *'''[[Victoria Wood]] as Brenda "Bren" Furlong''' :Bren is the deputy manager of the canteen,<ref name=":0">{{Cite web |last=Guide |first=British Comedy |date=2024-07-07 |title=dinnerladies - cooking up laughs - Comedy Rewind |url=https://www.comedy.co.uk/features/comedy-rewind/dinnerladies/ |access-date=2025-01-28 |website=British Comedy Guide |language=en}}</ref> and arguably the most reasonable of the characters. She had an unhappy childhood as her mother had her taken into foster care, and she later married an alcoholic named Martin of whom she was afraid. She is very good at solving her colleagues' problems but often doubts her ability to overcome her own hardships and has low [[self-esteem]]. She has a very quick mind, often scrambling for [[adjective]]s and making unintentional [[malapropism]]s. She has a near-encyclopaedic knowledge of film, which she makes many metaphorical references to, and gets as her subject on the [[game show|quiz show]] ''Totally Trivial''. Several times in the first series it is hinted that she has feelings for Tony, though nothing comes of this until halfway through the second series. At the end of the final episode, she and Tony make plans to move to Scotland. *'''[[Andrew Dunn (actor)|Andrew Dunn]] as Tony Martin''' :The divorced canteen manager, whose battle against cancer is a running storyline in the first series, prompting him to want to do more with his life than running a canteen in the second. He is mildly frustrated when the staff are not working, and tends to come out with sarcastic remarks. Though he talks and thinks about women a lot, he has very little luck with them. He is attracted to Bren, but is too shy to reveal this to her for a long time. He is also a smoker and uses his need for a cigarette as an excuse to escape uncomfortable or surreal situations. *'''[[Thelma Barlow]] as Dolly Bellfield''' :Something of a social climber, Dolly is the cattiest of the dinner ladies, often making bitchy remarks about others. Prim and prudish, she previously worked at the upmarket Café Bonbon. She frequently snaps at people for using bad language and frowns on the sexual shenanigans of Twinkle, whom she is convinced did not have to work for her catering qualification. Overtly conservative, she believes everything she reads in the ''[[Daily Mail]]'' without question, often quoting the articles she has read, and is prone to making remarks of dubious [[political correctness]]. She is fixated on her weight and dieting, although she is tempted to snack on [[Mars (chocolate bar)|Mars bars]] in stressful situations and it is revealed in several episodes that she was formerly obese. She has been married for thirty years to her husband Bob ([[Jack Smethurst]]), with whom she has a son named Stephen; it is implied that Stephen is in a [[homosexual]] relationship with his university roommate, Marcus, although this is a topic of embarrassment to Dolly, who seems to have reluctantly acknowledged the situation without truly accepting it. She hopes to move to the nearby upmarket village of [[Mobberley]] after her retirement. *'''[[Anne Reid]] as Jean''' :Dolly's best friend, Jean is very often the stooge for her mordant remarks. She has a somewhat bawdy sense of humour and is long-sighted, but refuses to wear her glasses, so often misinterprets headlines when reading newspapers or magazines. She is unhappily married to her husband Keith (Peter Lorenzelli) at the start of the series, with grown-up daughter Lisa ([[Jane Hazlegrove]]), but in series two he leaves her for a Welsh dental hygienist named Bronwyn. After getting over the shock, which leaves her so depressed and irritable that her sister Peggy ([[Linda Bassett]]) is called in to take her to [[Tunstall, Staffordshire|Tunstall]] to recuperate, Jean rediscovers her self-confidence and has a fling with security guard Barry (Howard Crossley), "the love muscle", before settling down in a more solid relationship with Stan. She accepts his proposal in the final episode, and reveals that she has been asked to stay on at HWD Components to run the snack bar replacing the canteen. *'''[[Maxine Peake]] as Twinkle''' :The youngest member of the team, she frequently turns up late for work and tries unsuccessfully to scrounge cigarettes from Tony. Despite her snarky attitude, she regards the other members of staff as friends, particularly Bren, to whom she turns for help on several occasions, such as when she thinks she is pregnant. She lives with her disabled mother Bev (Jackie Downey), for whom she acts as carer, and often spends her evenings getting drunk and falling into skips. Something of a recalcitrant delinquent who often [[Truancy|skipped school]], she speaks with a heavy [[Manchester dialect|Manc accent]] and is also a closeted [[Association football|football]] fan. *'''[[Shobna Gulati]] as Anita''' :Pleasant, but rather dim and forgetful, Anita is a kind and loyal friend to her colleagues, empathising with them and often helping them to solve their problems without even realising it. She is somewhat desperate to have a family and children, becoming pregnant in the second series after a one-night stand with a visiting decorator ([[Kevin Maxwell (actor)|Kevin Maxwell]]) and, terrified of the implications, leaves the baby on the fire escape on Millennium Eve, attaching a note asking Bren to look after him. However, she quickly returns to take the baby back. She is a big fan of [[Celine Dion]] and is of a [[South Asia]]n background. *'''[[Duncan Preston]] as Stan Meadowcroft''' :One of the factory's maintenance men, Stan lives with his father Jim ([[Eric Sykes]]), a retired [[7th Armoured Division (United Kingdom)|Desert Rat]] soldier of whom he often speaks. In the episode "moods", Stan reveals that his mother ran off with a piano tuner in 1954, which his father never recovered from. He is particularly close to Bren as she seems to be the only one who knows how to successfully handle his changeable moods. After his father's death he decides to get his life going again, embarking on a brief relationship with a nurse called Bobbi ([[Tina Malone]]) before dating, and ultimately proposing to, his colleague Jean, who accepts him in the final episode. Although he is well-meaning, Stan's behaviour can occasionally verge on being chauvinistic, believing that he should perform physical labour. This stems from his belief that such tasks (among others, such as seeing [[Carrion|animal carcasses]]) are not suitable for, as he puts it, "female women". *'''[[Celia Imrie]] as Philippa Moorcroft''' :The scatty and disorganised manager of the Human Resources department, having apparently landed the job because she was in a relationship with the factory manager, Mr Michael, who she refers to as Mikey. Her well-meaning attempts to relieve the dinner ladies' stress or help them in their personal lives generally have the opposite effect: in the first episode, she tries to organise [[Scottish country dance|Scottish country dancing]] sessions. In the second series she decides to break up with Mr Michael, and later begins a relationship with a colleague, Tom Murray (Mark Drewry). Philippa is the only character in the series who comes from the south of England. *'''[[Julie Walters]] as Petula Gordeno''' :Bren's selfish, manipulative, and delusional mother, who had Bren taken into foster care as a child because she was "cramping her style", and claims that she lost the address of the [[orphanage]]. She sometimes seems to forget that Bren is her daughter, and usually turns up looking for money or a favour. She often claims to be a close friend (and usually lover) of the rich and famous, but in reality is a down-and-out who lives in a caravan behind a petrol station.<ref name=":0" /><ref name=":1">{{Cite web |date=2023-04-04 |title=Comfort Classic: Dinnerladies |url=https://rts.org.uk/article/comfort-classic-dinnerladies |access-date=2025-01-28 |website=Royal Television Society |language=en}}</ref>{{#tag:ref|Gordeno claims to have known multiple celebrities, including: [[Richard Clayderman]], [[Frankie Vaughan]], [[Mandy Rice-Davies]], [[Art Garfunkel]], [[David Hockney]], [[Pat Phoenix]], [[Cliff Richard]], [[Catherine Deneuve]], [[Frank Sinatra]], [[Gerard Depardieu]], [[Mary Hopkin]], [[Tina Turner]], [[Sacha Distel]], [[Nina Simone]], [[Lauren Bacall]], [[Gwyneth Paltrow]], [[Judi Dench]], [[The Osmonds]], [[Lauren Bacall]], [[Roger Moore]], [[Jane Fonda]], [[George Michael]], [[Leonardo DiCaprio]], [[Kate Winslet]], [[Billy Connolly]], [[Miles Davis]], [[Karen Carpenter]], [[Henry Kissinger]], [[John Lennon]], [[Yoko Ono]], [[Robert Winston, Baron Winston|Robert Winston]], [[Sheena Easton]], [[Richard E. Grant]], [[Sophia Loren]], [[Ken Russell]], [[Yul Brynner]], [[Giant Haystacks]], [[Dusty Springfield]], [[Cindy Crawford]], several [[West Indies cricket team|West Indies cricketers]], and members of "the boxing fraternity". She also considers herself a contemporary of [[Haile Selassie]], [[Andy Warhol]], and [[Salvador Dalí]].|group=lower-alpha}} In the first series, she has an affair with 16-year-old Clint ([[Kenny Doughty]]). In the second series, she gets involved with Reg (Kaleem Janjua), an Asian petrol station attendant, and claims to be pregnant with his child. In the final episode, she dies off-screen on 29 February 2000, after having been admitted to hospital on 7 February with three weeks to live. It is revealed that her real name was the same as Bren's; Bren muses that she "can't have hated [her] that much" if she named her after herself.
Summary:
Please note that all contributions to Niidae Wiki may be edited, altered, or removed by other contributors. If you do not want your writing to be edited mercilessly, then do not submit it here.
You are also promising us that you wrote this yourself, or copied it from a public domain or similar free resource (see
Encyclopedia:Copyrights
for details).
Do not submit copyrighted work without permission!
Cancel
Editing help
(opens in new window)
Search
Search
Editing
Dinnerladies (TV series)
(section)
Add topic