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 (1991-01-03) – 24 February 1997 (1997-02-24)
Infobox instructions (only shown in preview)
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]
^"The Top 50 British Sitcoms". British Sitcom Guide. Archived from the original on 2 January 2007. Retrieved 15 April 2008.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link)
^Berman, Garry (1999). Best of the Britcoms : from Fawlty Towers to Absolutely Fabulous. Internet Archive. Dallas, Tex : Taylor. ISBN 978-0-87833-160-4.
^Red Dwarf Smegazine (June 1993). June 1993.
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