List of The Brittas Empire Characters - Gordon Wellesley Brittas

Gordon Wellesley Brittas

Gordon Wellesley Brittas is the Manager of the ill-fated Whitbury Leisure Centre.

Brittas was temporarily replaced as manager twice. Firstly in series 4 where Brittas resigns to protect Helen from being sent to jail after Councillor Druggett threatened to expose her theft from petty cash if Brittas did not resign. The second time is in Series 7 where Carole's "lion within" tricks Brittas into breaking council regulations on the use of ladders. Brittas resigns and the council appoint Carole to run the centre.

Brittas is extremely dedicated to his job and cares dearly for everyone around him, including his unstable wife Helen. He has grand ambitions of making the world a better place, and aims to fulfill his dream of bringing people together through sport. Despite his noble and well-meant intentions, however, Brittas's management only ever causes disaster and chaos, resulting in pathetically low attendance rates, catastrophic fires, floods and even customer deaths on several occasions. In typical bureaucratic style, he is obsessed with paperwork and forces his staff and customers to fill in thousands of different forms for the most banal of things, such as lost property claims. Throughout the entire show, he remains blissfully unaware of his total incompetence as a manager and the negative effect he has on everybody around him.

An example of Brittas's tactlessness is in "Temple Of The Body", where he suspects someone is having sex in the centre, telling Carol that she has nothing to worry about, because whatever is happening is only with "the younger and more attractive women, such as Linda, Julie and Laura".

Brittas is also extremely petty, insisting on over-complicated forms at reception, and ridiculous rules on what not to wear in the centre, only serving to frustrate potential customers and centre staff. In series seven, Brittas rigs up a computer system to control every aspect of the centre, which over-complicates even the simple task of distributing floats by the swimming pools, and results in someone drowning.

Brittas is also accident-prone, and will make careless mistakes with fatal consequences. For example, in "Laura's Leaving", Brittas tugs at a wire which drops a live electric heater into the main swimming pool. This electrocutes a group of Pentecostal Christians performing a baptism ceremony in the water. Alternatively, if a small problem does develop without his doing, Brittas will try to solve it, thus creating a much larger problem. Helen points out in the second episode that "once starts dealing with little problems, they don't go away; you just get bigger ones" and then in series three, that the disasters in the centre always start with something trivial going wrong. Also once, Laura points out that he is very good at solving big problems, but is hopeless at solving all the other ones.

In "Back From The Dead", it is revealed that Gordon was born in 1958 (2 years before Chris Barrie, who was born in 1960). In series 6, it was revealed that Helen was born in 1956, making her two years older than Gordon. In series 3, it is revealed that his middle name is "Wellesley".

Gordon has a fraternal twin brother, Horatio Brittas, a priest who shares his dream of bringing communities together. He has six children with Helen, a trait which apparently runs throughout his side of the family. Unknown to him until the very last episode of the series, Carol's twins are also his - the result of a boozy mix-up at Julie's New Year's Eve party, where Carol and Helen both happened to dress in identical tiger costumes, leading to Gordon's mistake.

Brittas can in many respects be considered a forerunner to David Brent of The Office. His lack of self-awareness and ability to alienate and offend his staff despite his genuine good intentions are examples of commonality between the characters.

Writers of the show Norriss and Fegen decided to make series five the final series, thus Brittas is "killed" by a falling water tank. However Chris Barrie returned to play Brittas for a further two series, as the BBC wanted the popular show to continue. New writers were brought on to replace the show's creators. The show's actual ending was in 1997, when Brittas, at the end of series seven, wakes up on a train heading for Whitbury. According to this ending, the entire series was a dream.