Episodes
The Brittas Empire was broadcast for fifty-two episodes between 1991 and 1997, spanning seven series and two Christmas Specials, along with one short episode for Children in Need. Series one, two and three in 1993, and series four and five both aired in 1994. The Brittas Empire then returned to BBC1 for three final series, and the cast also performed in the 1996 Royal Variety Performance. Chris Barrie played Brittas again in the short fitness series spin-off, Get Fit with Brittas.
For the first five series the show's creators Richard Fegen and Andrew Norriss co-wrote the show, after which they left, along with actress Julia St John who played Laura. Series five was originally meant to be the final series, and Norriss and Fegen killed off Brittas at its end, when he was crushed to death by a falling water tank.
However, the show's popularity meant the BBC resurrected Brittas and brought on a team of new writers, who carried the show on for a further two series, including one further Christmas special in 1996. These writers were: Paul Smith (who also wrote the series seven episode 'Malcom ex' for Andrew Marshall's 2point4 children), Terry Kyan, Tony Millan, Mike Walling, Ian Davidson and Peter Vincent.
'Curse of the Tiger Women' is the final episode in 1997. This ending claims all seven series were part of a dream that Brittas is having on his way to the job interview for manager of the leisure centre. It is an ending that is regarded as poor by many critics and viewers, and contradicts the 1994 Christmas Special by Fegen and Norriss, showing what happens to the staff post-Whitbury Leisure Centre.
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Famous quotes containing the word episodes:
“Twenty or thirty years ago, in the army, we had a lot of obscure adventures, and years later we tell them at parties, and suddenly we realize that those two very difficult years of our lives have become lumped together into a few episodes that have lodged in our memory in a standardized form, and are always told in a standardized way, in the same words. But in fact that lump of memories has nothing whatsoever to do with our experience of those two years in the army and what it has made of us.”
—Václav Havel (b. 1936)
“What is a novel if not a conviction of our fellow-men’s existence strong enough to take upon itself a form of imagined life clearer than reality and whose accumulated verisimilitude of selected episodes puts to shame the pride of documentary history?”
—Joseph Conrad (1857–1924)