The Brittas Empire | |
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Genre | Black comedy Farce Sitcom |
Created by | Andrew Norriss Richard Fegen |
Directed by | Mike Stephens Christine Gernon |
Starring | Chris Barrie Pippa Haywood Julia St John Mike Burns Harriet Thorpe Tim Marriott Jill Greenacre Russell Porter Judy Flynn Stephen Churchett Anouschka Menzies Andrée Bernard John Carrigan |
Theme music composer | Frank Renton |
Country of origin | United Kingdom |
Original language | English |
No. of series | 7 |
No. of episodes | 52 (list of episodes) |
Production | |
Executive producer | Mike Stephens |
Producer | Mike Stephens |
Running time | 30 mins |
Original release | |
Network | BBC1 |
Release | 3 January 1991 24 February 1997 | –
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The Brittas Empire is a British sitcom created and originally written by Andrew Norriss and Richard Fegen. Chris Barrie played titular character Gordon Brittas, the well-intentioned but hugely incompetent manager of the fictional Whitbury New Town Leisure Centre. The show ran for seven series and 52 episodes – including two Christmas specials – from 1991 to 1997 on BBC1. Creators Norriss and Fegen co-wrote the first five series. The series peaked at 10 million viewers.
The Brittas Empire enjoyed a long and successful run throughout the 1990s, and gained large mainstream audiences. In 2004, the show came 47th on the BBC's Britain's Best Sitcom poll,[1] and all series have been released on DVD both individually as series and as a complete boxset. Best of the Britcoms noted the series has been hailed as "the Fawlty Towers of the 1990s" due to its "fast-paced, outrageous [comedy] full of inventive gags".[2]
The creators Andrew Norriss and Richard Fegen often combined farce with either surreal or dramatic elements in episodes. For example, in the first series, the leisure centre prepares for a royal visit, only for the doors to seal, the boiler room to flood and a visitor to become electrocuted. Unlike many traditional sitcoms, deaths were quite commonplace in The Brittas Empire. Barrie described the humour as "straightfoward, slapstick, very accessible characters, larger-than-life abnormal things happening in a very normal situation".[3]
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