Saturday 9 February 2019

A Comedy On This Day: The Brittas Empire - Gavin Featherly R.I.P. (10 February 1997)


 Carrying on a series without its original writer-creators is always tricky, but especially one that had as original a tone and structure as The Brittas Empire. Terry Kyan's script (concerning the supposed death at sea of a regular) aims for outrageous black comedy, but feels a bit too messy to pull it off. A lot of it happens away from the leisure centre (at the seaside, at sea and at the cemetery), which doesn't really play to the series' abiding strengths of the peculiar manager of a bizarre workplace.

 The most interesting aspect of the episode is the two guest characters - Donald Pickering and Rowena Cooper as the bickering grieving parents - in whom the writer could create something new and follow his own interests.

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