Paul Dood’s Deadly Lunch Break

Katherine Parkinson (born 1977 or 1978) is an English actress. She appeared in the Channel 4 comedy series The IT Crowd as Jen Barber, for which she won BAFTA's British Academy Television Award for Best Female Comedy Performance in 2014. In 2026, she won her second BAFTA TV Comedy Award for her role in Here We Go. A University of Oxford graduate, Parkinson studied at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. She has appeared on stage in the plays The Seagull (2007), Cock (2009), and Home, I'm Darling (2018), for which she was nominated for the Olivier Award for Best Actress in a Play. Parkinson was also a main cast member of the series Doc Martin for three series (2005–2009). She co-starred in all three series of Humans, a science-fiction drama on AMC/Channel 4, which aired from 2015 until 2018. She has also appeared in the films The Boat That Rocked (2009) and The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (2018).