List of The Brittas Empire Characters - Helen Brittas (series 1-4, Series 4-7)

Helen Brittas (series 1-4, Series 4-7)

Helen Brittas is the long-suffering wife of Gordon Brittas.

Helen starts out as a marginally depressed housewife, disillusioned and agitated by her oblivious husband and his grand schemes. Throughout the course of the show, she becomes gradually more neurotic and insane, to the point of forgetting how many children she has.

She often requires support from Brittas's deputy Laura Lancing, and frequently pours her heart out to Laura, telling her the stress Gordon is causing her, and about her latest one-night-stands or stupid mistakes. Helen relies on other people to lie for her, to cover up her addictive shoplifting and her constant cheating on Gordon with other men.

From series 3-5, Helen begins to show a criminal side. In "Sex, Lies, And Red Tape", a department store accuses Helen of stealing a wedding dress, some shoes, a handbag, and a barbecue set. This episode also reveals that Helen has been arrested for shoplifting, 7 or 9 times, before she met Gordon. In "The Chop", Helen takes £300 from the centre's petty cash to buy a dog, which forces Gordon to temporarily resign, (Also revealing that in 2 of her shoplifting cases, she was accused of bodily harm). In "The Elephant Child", Helen (along with Julie) tries to steal her own fur coat in the hopes of embezzling £5000 from the insurance. This illegal behaviour of Helen's has made life extremely difficult for Gordon.

Throughout the series, it is clear that Helen has an addiction to drugs (which she uses to help herself deal with the agitation she receives from Gordon), such as demanding them from a doctor, marching through a snowdrift to get some more, and once when being assaulted, all she cared about was that the attacker had taken her drugs.

She has also plotted several times to get rid of Brittas, including arranging for him to be assassinated while on holiday in Bulgaria. Despite this, however, Helen loves Gordon very much, and her affection for him grows as the series has progressed.

As for the latter, at one stage Helen tries to kill her children's teacher by reversing into his classroom for giving them a "D" in English (Helen completed the work herself, and so the teacher had actually given her a "D"). Helen casually states to Laura how he wasn't hurt and "swung up on a light fitting".

Helen is also shown to be a hypocrite, because she is always cheating on Gordon (and feels no remorse for it, and Gordon trusts her), yet ironically in one episode, when she suspects that Gordon is having an affair with Carol, she goes mad, such as trying to kill Carol, and being furious at Gordon, even though she's been much worse than Gordon, and Gordon would be devastated if he found out what she had been up to (although it was later revealed that they were not having an affair).

Helen appears in all episodes, apart from one in series four when she "accidentally" books the family holiday to Cornwall on the wrong week, thus leaving Gordon unable to attend; a mistake which she also made the previous year.

Helen and Gordon have six children, two of whom she gives birth to in the middle of Whitbury High Street after a comedy-of-errors which results in their car being blocked in.