If the great Victoria Wood had been born before the age of television, she would have been a playwright or, more likely, a novelist. Or maybe both.

It is not in any way to detract from the performances of the actors who delivered her lines, or her own assured although somewhat self-effacing performance, but, fundamentally, she was a writer.

And what a writer! She broke boundaries by putting women and self-consciousness about class, sex and body image at the heart of her comedy. Inevitably, Dinnerladies draws from this deep well of Woodland.

Re-watching the show, her one and only sitcom, it’s striking how much she crams into the screenplay of a single episode. The script crackles, full to the brim with so many jokes that it’s easy to miss some of them.

No wonder she said that she hoped people would watch the programme more than once. Only then would audiences be able to enjoy the full richness of this outstanding comedy, voted number 10 in a 2019 Radio Times poll of the best sitcoms of all time.

Sitcom is, of course, the hardest of the TV arts to get right. Recorded live in the studio before an audience, Dinnerladies, which ran from late 1998 to early 2000, looked effortless once it was edited. In fact, the show was recorded twice, on Friday and Saturday nights in order to incorporate Wood’s rewrites. Thus, huge demands were made on the cast.

Wood wanted to do a workplace comedy, rather than one featuring a domestic setting – she hated those – and laboured to perfect every line.

Some of the Dinnerladies cast have spoken of the endless rewrites, Wood sometimes staying up until 4:00am on the day of recording until she was satisfied. “It was really full on – high pressure. I had to make it as good as it could be,” she once recalled.

Typically, given Wood’s devotion to the north in her humour, Dinnerladies was set in the kitchen of a Manchester factory canteen. She excelled at making the mundane funny. What could be more fitting than locating her sitcom in a works canteen?

The series was commissioned by BBC One and the debut episode was watched by more than 12 million viewers, an extraordinary figure by today’s standards and an indication of her huge popularity, nurtured by a succession of TV series, most notably Victoria Wood – As Seen on TV.

Unusually for a sitcom, she wrote every single episode, without the assistance of even a script editor. As noted, Wood was a perfectionist and a harsh critic of her own work. During the second and final season of Dinnerladies she suffered from a crisis of confidence in her writing, but overcame it.

Wood may have been used to having all the limelight in many of her previous TV incarnations and in her sell-out, one-woman stage tours but, once the cameras started rolling, Dinnerladies was a democratic series. She was one of a company of players, many of whom she had worked with for years, and she didn’t hog the best lines.

Her character, Brenda “Bren” Furlong, is reliable and a shoulder to cry on for some of the other, more emotional canteen workers. She is drawn to one of the few men in the show, the wry canteen manager Tony Martin (Andrew Dunn). Over the course of the two series, their stuttering romance gradually develops.

Throughout, the acting is note perfect, whether it’s a young Maxine Peake as the gormless Twinkle, Celia Imrie – the one southerner and middle-class character – as scatty human resources manager Philippa Moorcroft or Shobna Gulati as the naive Anita.

This being a Victoria Wood show, audiences would have felt short-changed had her comrade-in-arms Julie Walters not found her way into the kitchen. She brings an almost surreal edge to proceedings by playing Brenda’s dissolute and penniless mother, who is reduced to living in a caravan behind a petrol station.

Sitcoms are an endangered species in today’s high-production TV era. I would have liked to see how Victoria Wood, who died at the tragically young at 62, might have approached a modern, big-budget comedy-drama. Thankfully, part of her legacy is the charming, albeit sometimes spikey, Dinnerladies.

Dinnerladies is on Sky Go, NOW TV, ITVX and BritBox.