Editing Dinnerladies (TV series) (section)

===Writing===
{{quote box
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|quote="I do get very lonely and I nearly jacked it in [...]<!-- about April. --> I thought it was very bad and I couldn't write comedy any more."
|source=— [[Victoria Wood]]<ref name=rt />
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}}
The series was written entirely by Victoria Wood, with no additional contributors or script editor. Wood approached writing by allowing plots to develop from interactions between characters, rather than fitting characters into pre-determined storylines.<ref name=uktvabout>{{cite web|title=Dinnerladies|url=https://gold.uktv.co.uk/dinnerladies/article/about-dinnerladies/|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220129133036/https://gold.uktv.co.uk/dinnerladies/article/about-dinnerladies/|url-status=dead|archive-date=29 January 2022|publisher=UKTV|access-date=25 September 2024}}</ref>

She wrote the whole six-episode first series in one month; however, she found the second series much harder to write, and even though it had only four more episodes, it took her six months. Wood has attributed this to pressure to do everything herself and loneliness, and has said that she even considered giving up because she thought her scripts were of low quality.<ref name=uktvabout />

Wood deliberately ended the programme after two series, and the final episode of the second was designed to conclude it. She has said that she "[doesn't] normally do anything twice", but felt that a second series was necessary to do the show justice, and that she knew where to take the show after seeing it air and understanding "what people [have] taken from it". She mentioned the short run of ''[[Fawlty Towers]]'' when explaining why she planned not to continue the series further.<ref name=rt /> However, in a televised BBC TV documentary about the history of situation comedy at the corporation, Wood complained that the series had been axed by the BBC, despite it being what she described as "a show they couldn't kill".{{Citation needed|date=June 2024}}