User reviews

First of all, I find it hard to believe that this launched way back in 1991. Apart from the cars and clothes, it hasn't dated, the humour has remained raucous, relevant and divinely silly. Politically things have of course changed, and the thought of a Leisure Centre actually opening is almost now unthinkable.

Made during a time where the abiilty to create big characters was very much there, and whilst you can perhaps argue that Gordon Brittas wasn't as big as say Victor Meldrew, for many he was.

Chris Barrie was terrific as the majestically annoying Brittas, he had to ability to make you laugh, and feel utterly irritated in unison. Incredibly well written, it was hugely funny, with big characters, Carole and Colin in particular.

Watching it now, it stands up to the test of time. It is very funny indeed. 8/10

Although this comedy doesn't hold any amazingly new comedy formula - it doesn't seem to have to. THE CHARACTERS hold it together brilliantly, as does the twisted plot of each episode.

Gordon Brittas could be someone you know! The kind of person who insults and upsets you when all they're trying to do it help and give you some 'sound advice'. They mean well, but destroy everything, and indeed everyone, they go near.

The main thing about someone like Brittas, is they're hard to hate. You can't tell someone off when all they're trying to do is good! This is what makes the character of Brittas outrageous, but also believable. And it answers the question as to why after all these years he's still married and still has full time employment!

Mrs. Brittas makes me laugh the most. What a wonderful depressed, sarcastic, pill-popping character she is. Most importantly, they explain during the first series through her dialogue, exactly why she stays with Gordon. She feel comfortable with him, despite how annoying he is. It seems she is almost stuck in a rut, so to speak.

Colin is another great character. "I was just syringing my ears and I seem to have flushed out a couple of wood lice!!" The idea that the deputy wet of a leisure center who is suppose to be healthy and fit (and indeed should be!) looks and probably smells like a tramp is hilarious! Being Brittas' lackey gets him into some hilarious slap-stick situations.

Carol, the receptionist with post-natal depression who keeps her baby in her desk draw, is a vital character as well. She almost seems impervious to Brittas when he's compared to her other problems and she is often found sobbing at her desk.

The plot of each episode is a twisted journey that builds up and up with Brittas trying more and more to get everything under control, but everything just gets slowly worse. People get trapped in lifts, fainting from heat exhaustion and starting to cry after Brittias' words of encouragement.

A GREAT SHOW - well worth watching over and over again. Easy to watch and really easy to laugh at.

Mr Gordon Brittas is chief of Whitbury Newtown Leisure center. He thinks he's brilliant, but in fact everything he does turns into a disaster. The only person in his staff who thinks he's brilliant too, Colin, who's cleaning toilets all the time, is an absolute failure. Brittas's wife is depressed all the time - guess why. No one's coming to the leisure center - guess why. Gordon Brittas has a dream, but it never quite turns out the way he planned it. THE BRITTAS EMPIRE does have its surrealist moments (Carol "Whitbury Newtown Leisure Center how may I help you?" is keeping her children in drawers), it has its "thrilling" moments (like when Santa Claus tries to kill the whole staff during a survival course)... but everything is always funny, like Gordon Brittas when he tells his own dad "don't you SON me" -- or when he tells his wife about a "magical moment" he spent with her but she doesn't know what he's talking about....or the Christian fundamentalists from the U.S. who pronounce Brittas's name as "bright-ass" and want to re-baptize him... THE BRITTAS EMPIRE is, as the man himself, Gordon Brittas, would say, "eeeeeexcellent"....

I've never understood the school of thought which says all prime time comedy is 'bland' whilst anything post-watershed is 'dark' and 'original'. 'The Brittas Empire' was enjoyed by a family audience, yet also managed to be 'dark'; people got shot, electrocuted, decapitated etc. Chris Barrie played 'Gordon Brittas', manager of a leisure centre, a man whose incompetence is matched only by his delusions of grandeur. His put-upon staff include the odious handyman Colin and emotionally overwrought receptionist Carole. Brittas' wife Helen is neurotic and who can blame her for being so? Richard Fegen and Andrew Noriss have not received nearly enough credit for their cleverly constructed scripts, which carefully balanced 'slapstick' with 'black comedy'. They had the sense to include normal characters such as Laura. Comedy shows peopled entirely by loonies get tiresome very quickly. Not regarded as one of the comedy classics of the '90's, but funnier than many of the ones that are.

The Brittas Empire is great, and everything you could want from a comedy.

the story lines are mad and the characters madder but that's the appeal, escapism, to be lost in the madness of Whitbury new town leisure centre.

The premise is the leisure centre run by the amazing Gordon Brittas, a picky, annoying, fussy, squeaky voiced man who constantly causes havoc, whilst annoying the public and organizing too many staff meetings and team bonding sessions. the staff are all too familiar with his ways and they add to the fun.

There's the fantastic caretaker Colin, disgusting, huge boil on his cheek. couldn't care less secretary Julie, Carol the receptionist whose son lives in the cupboard, Gavin and Tim (Are they gay?) Brittas would be horrified. Linda and Laura, pretty normal, but good, Laura knows how to get round Brittas and Linda is quite feisty and then there's Gordon's long suffering wife Helen, a bit flaky, shop-lifter, obsessive and quite often pregnant, all of them are great actors and very funny.

Every week something bonkers occurs, anything you can imagine happening at a leisure centre seems to happen; murders, explosions, and mainly customers wanting to kill Gordon.

Well written and Chris Barrie (Brittas) is just great to watch, his mannerisms make me laugh so much and the way he doesn't listen to any of his staff reminds me of so many managers.

Even when Gordon Brittas was on a sponsored silence he was annoying! Watch this for a bit of fun and an escape from real life, definitely the best of the 90's.

The Brittas Empire has always stuck in my memory from when I used to watch it when I was little and for years I have wanted to see it again but it is never repeated on BBC or even UKTV like all the other BBC comedies like Only Fools & Horses, Open All Hours etc. I don't understand why because it is one of the best comedies I have ever seen. Anyway, a little while ago I was flipping through the Sky channels and I noticed it was on Bravo. I watched it all day and was in stitches with laughter but then I never saw it on there again. Anyway, that prompted me to look for it on the internet on DVD and I couldn't believe it when I saw that I could get a set of DVD's with all 7 series on! I finally got them this Christmas and I have been watching them since and I have almost seen all of them now, just the last 3 or 4 eps of series 7 to go.

Anyway, I seriously recommend that you get the box set of all the 7 series if you love this, sadly rarely shown, comedy! In fact even if you have never seen it before by the DVDs because I am sure that if you like comedy you'll love this! All of the series are good but my favourites are series 3,4&5 I think. I particularly like the episode where Gordon gets Helen stuck in the car when she is giving birth to the twins! I could remember this episode really well from when I first watched them on TV in the 90s when I was little!! My favourite characters (apart from Brittas without whom, of course, it wouldn't work) are Carol (the receptionist who keeps her children in the drawers), Helen (Brittas's Wife) and Laura (Brittas's deputy (series 1-5) who holds everything together when Brittas is wreaking his havoc!).

It's never a good thing when the lead character in a sitcom annoys you in the first five minutes that you star to wish for other characters to appear so that you get some peace from him.

That's the situation I faced with Mr Brittas in this BBC sitcom from the 90's. I only watched it because people compared the brilliant Matthew Perry show 'Mr Sunshine' to it, but I found nothing that matched that show's excellence - and ironically this ran far longer.

I'm sure it was funny in its time, and it certainly has a fan base, but comedy is a very subjective genre, and this show didn't do a lot for me.

This is probably in my favourite top 3 sitcoms from the 1990's.

The character of Gordon Brittas played by the wonderful Chris Barrie is probably one of the best sitcom characters of all-time.

Anyone who likes British comedy but has yet to see this series, i'd recommend they seek this out because it is brilliant (virtually every episode)!

i'd love to see the cast & writers return for a new series.

Chris Barrie is probably more famous for playing Rimmer in "Red Drawf" but the Brittas Empire is his best work in my opinion.

Each episode is totally mad & far from boring!

If you have never seen the Brittas Empire I wish I was you because I'd love to laugh at it again for the first time. Chris Barrie brilliantly represents the kind of officious but well-meaning twerp that the world is now infested with, believing in the words of his wife that he is the oil that greases the machine, when really he is a big bag of grit. I think you can see his influence elsewhere with Alan Partridge and David Brent just a couple of characters with a bit of Brittas in them.

The other characters are well represented with the permanently afflicted Colin and his pill-popping wife standing out in particular. The episode in which Brittas closes the Leisure Centre in order to find a stolen £5 note and imprisons the near-incontinent Colin in a locker to catch the culprit unawares is a particular favourite.

Some of the later episodes are a bit weaker but the writers on the whole do a good job of thinking up ways for Brittas to inflict misery on the staff and patrons of Whitbury Newtown Leisure Centre.

It is a shame we don't see a lot of Chris Barrie these days as he has obvious talent as a comic actor as well as an impressionist.

Sometimes you see a character on television or in film that makes you wonder what you would think of them if they were a real person and you could actually meet them. Other characters you might be sure you'd run away from, screaming in terror. I think that - if I had the fortune (perhaps that should be misfortune) to cross the path of Gordon Wellesley Brittas, I would surely end up on as many combinations of tranquillisers as his poor wife Helen gets through.

Earlier this year, I made the excellent choice to buy the complete DVD box set, including all the Christmas specials and every single episode from the seven series made by the BBC, and every now and then I like to watch a few (or maybe even more than a few) episodes, so I can remember the brilliant comedy I used to watch when I was little. This weekend, I've watched a terrible mix-up in communications that led to Buttercup the cow having her breech calf delivered to the strains of a Mozart piano concerto by a gynaecologist who'd just finished playing squash, while poor Carole the receptionist went into labour in the swimming pool and ended up having her twins delivered by a vet in the leisure centre sauna.

I've watched a massive tarantula escape from the box somebody sent it to Brittas as hate mail in. I saw Brittas run amok with a chainsaw and concluded that he decapitated the poor unfortunate who had been knocked unconscious behind the door he was trying to cut through. I've seen him deal with his wife Helen's occasional visits to him by telling his deputy, Laura, "Take Mrs. Brittas for a cup of coffee, and perhaps a doughnut" over and over again. Poor Mrs. Brittas has twins in the middle of a high street while the whole town watches her, simply because she was unfortunate enough that she couldn't insist on Laura being the one who took her to hospital.

Sometimes you see a character on television that you don't believe in, but I don't see anything of that kind at Whitbury Newtown Leisure Centre. I see Tim and Gavin, insanely jealous of each other, and yet in a relationship that is never explicitly stated, but that I can understand now much better than when I watched the comedy as a child. I don't know how Laura copes as deputy manager, and in the end I think she doesn't know how she does it, either. It is an eternal mystery to me that no one tries to treat Colin's countless skin complaints, or sends Julie the secretary on a customer relations course. I don't know how Carole's children survive living in drawers and cupboards behind the reception desk, but they do.

Perhaps the most frightening aspect of Gordon Brittas is that he genuinely cares for everyone. His staff, his wife, his children and his leisure centre are all so very important to him, but it seems to be in his nature to drive them to the brink of sanity and back. And whatever Gordon does - be it knocking out a famous Russian pianist with a bowling ball, or taking charge of his irate staff when they get snowed into the leisure centre together - he always does it for the best. And that's the scarily appealing thing about him.

Enter the chaotic world of Gordon Brittas,..the well-meaning walking disaster manager of Whitbury Leisure Centre.

For series 1-5, The Brittas Empire is a surreal but real world of hilarious chaos. It's often quite dark, with deaths and bizarre accidents a frequent occurrence. But like all great sitcoms, the writers, Fergan and Norris get you empathise with their nicely fleshed-out characters.

However thinks aren't so good when the writers leave and a new team of writers carry on for series 6, who just don't seem to get it.

Series 7 is better than 6, but really you only need to see series 1-5.

A Christmas special is confirmed for 2015 penned by one of the original writers, as Whitbury Leisure Centre opens its doors once more to the unsuspecting public. Let's hope the show's comeback is 'exxxxxxcellent!'.

It's hard to review this show as a whole, since there are two parts to it: Series 1-5 (Including the Christmas Special 'In The Beginning') which was all written by the shows Creators... And Series 6 and 7, written by a large team of writers who just didn't get the show.

At the end of Series 5, and the subsequent Christmas special, you had the original creators intended ending and perfect epilogue to finish it all off. (I can't imagine a more perfect ending to this series than the ending of the creators final episode 'In The Beginning'. It sums up everything the show is and has a phenomenal message about what trial can be an opportunity for in life.)

But because of the shows popularity, the BBC brought it back for 2 more seasons even though the original creators had finished the story, and those two seasons are an absolute disaster of nonsense.

The first 5 seasons are near perfect. From start to finish there isn't a bad episode. Some are weaker than others, but not a single one is bad or not entertaining. I'll admit at first, coming from being a fan of Red Dwarf, seeing Chris Barrie with this voice and personality irritated me for the first few episodes, but once I got used to him being more than just Rimmer, I realised how great it was.

Then came series 6 and 7... And the show lost the plot. The new writers had no idea what made the show so special, it's heart. Instead they focussed on pure chaos only and the whole show felt idiotic. The characters all changed from some of the best sitcom characters I've ever seen, to being cartoon stereotypes of whatever the writers of the week thought they should be that week. They made Brittas a literal idiot, when originally he was quite a genius that just didn't get people... They made Colin into a one dimensional fool, and they turned Linda from one of the most eager and positive characters into a violent and mean psychopath. They just didn't get it.

To add unsult to injury, the ending of the series completely ruined the entire show AND the perfect ending the original writers had finished on with 'In The Beginning'. It's one thing to send a show downhill after taking over, but its another to retcon the original creators intended ending.

It's hard for me to say whether people should even watch seasons 6 and 7... On one hand I'd say absolutely not. It leaves a bad taste in my mouth when I do. And when I watch through Series 1 to 5 only, it feels like a perfect conclusion and I'm satisfied. Yet, there are a few little highlights after, most notably the final 1996 Christmas Special being the best of the entire last two seasons, and the Body Snatchers episode from Series 6 (which, while being pretty cringe worthy, has some decent laughs.)

So I think I'd recommend to watch it all the way through once... But then only watch from Series 1-5 (and The series 5 Christmas Special "In The Beginning', the final episode written by original creators) to get the proper experience.

I have watched series one. However, I cannot watch anymore, because it is rubbish. I have watched many comedy shows in my life, but this must be the worst ever. With poor scripts, and casting. The studio audience must have been paid to laugh. Because, I never laughed at all in series one. Slapstick? Never!

Therefore, avoid like the plague in my opinion. I always knew there is nothing funny about health clubs, and I was correct.

In the 1980's there were many classic comedy shows.

What happened to English humour in the 1990's?

Because many of the shows from that decade are just so bad!

Thank you for reading my review today!

I think there is one line that sums up this fantastic Brittish show: "Last year we had 600 people visit this centre and I am proud to say that 500 went home uninjured"- Mr Brittas During the Episode "Exposed".

The first episode of this series had me rolling on the floor. The situation of promoting someone to get rid of him rang so true. In my profession, I saw the same CV hype and management disasters that were in the program. I was surprised that some people found it deeply confronting and hated it with a passion. Perhaps they were Brittas types themselves! The supporting cast also mirrored reality, loyally supporting a boss who didn't deserve their support and being blamed for all the problems that the boss created. Of course, the people who appointed Brittas were not going to admit to having made a mistake. He had, after all, impressed them at interview. Had he not had a wide range of positions, demonstrating a depth of experience? They, like other interview committees, did not not investigate Brittas' record in these positions and see the trail of destruction that he had left.

Brittas Empire is one of the funniest British comedies. My biggest regret is the relationship between Gordon and Laura, their unresolved feelings and mutual attraction. I would love for them to bring the show to America after Whitbury Leisure Center burns down. Gordon, Helen, Carol, and the children arrive in Los Angeles to run a run down hotel in Los Angeles, Brittas Hotel. In L.A., they run into newly divorced Laura and her son. Imagine Brittas running an American Los Angeles hotel which is one step away from condemnation. Now, imagine Brittas Hotel as a potential sitcom, the laughs would be endless and it would be a hit. Most people don't get the brilliance of such humor. I loved the cast members like Gavin, Tim, Colin, his disrespectful secretary that I understand more and more. The show always made you laugh enough till you cried. I can't wait for the DVD to be shown in America.

I have to agree with the other posts, except the 1 star review. But even that review is more positive than the poster realized. They said it didn't compare to Matthew Perry's show. Well, anyone who thinks Matthew Perry is the least bit entertaining isn't likely to appreciate, or even understand this show. It is brilliant, and each episode builds on the past episodes. All of the characters are, like in Fawlty Towers, worthless. You don't care about the characters, so when the writers have things happen to them for comedic effect, you simply laugh your butt off, and don't find yourself feeling bad for them. It is simply light hearted entertainment.

I recently started watching this series and have come to realize it was one of the best Brit-coms of all time. It has a certain warmth to it with the right combination of actors and actresses. I can relate to the idiocy of the know-it-all boss as I have encountered several such bosses over the years, along with the employees who are doing the best job they can in spite of it all. To be a British creation, there is miraculously little foul language. There is even a bit of CHRISTianity to it in a few shows. This is one of those few gems that could have continued for several decades, yet they ended it far too soon. Still, it does have a proper ending that you must see. I am not going to spoil it for you. Watch it all, and enjoy!

I've only recently discovered this gem on PBS. This has got to be one of the funniest shows I've ever seen. I haven't laughed so hard in quite awhile. I've never seen anyone as clueless as Brittas. I didn't start until the epi where they believe he's dead. I hope that this wonderful show continues on American TV.

Well, I'm about to start watching the whole thing from start to finish for the third or fourth or fifth time, and I just can't wait.

Okay, so it may not be everyone's cup of tea, but it is so funny. I have to say that I'm saddened that some folks don't get it, and don't understand why anyone would rate this less than 9. I can only assume that they must be blessed with a narrow sense of humour.

What's so good is that Brittas is so bloody annoying, he makes me cringe, as does Colin. The entire supporting cast is terrific and makes for a uniquely British comedy series that shines.

Yes, it makes your toes curl up sometimes, but boy is it terrific.

Before we begin, I will point out one thing; I love this thing, an oddity consdering the fact that the first time I've even heard of this show was in 2020 thanks to my phase in Red Dwarf. I watched it with intrigue and whilst I found Barrie to have an annoying voice and personality (especially since Rimmer had no such voice), I soon became accustomed to it (no doubt helped by it softening between Series 1 and 2).

What helped with the show's appeal was that he reminded me of myself. He was smart when he could be but he couldn't understand social skills at all (as in, even subtext was alien to him) and that reverbrated with me, being a young Autistic myself. It helped that although he could be annoying, the show went out of it's way to show that he could be a good person and his sometimes horrified reactions to the chaos (as well as his relationship with Laura) helped humanised him. The rest of the cast were great as them. You had one of the earliest instances of a gay couple protrayed positively and you also had the permanently trampled on Carole, who you felt sorry for.

This all coincided with a Christmas special (apparently intended as the finale) which showed that the staff went on to greater things. All of which were squandered by Series 6 and 7, which removed all of the humansing aspects of the series. As such, it just became pure chaos, with the characters reduced to flat stereotypes and Brittas becoming a jerk dumbass. All which ended with a special which claims that all of the preceeding events were just a dream. If they ever do get around to reviving the series, they'd better retcon it away Roseanne style of something because that ending just leaves a bitter taste in my mouth.