A Comedy On This Day: The Worker - Out Of The Mouths Of Casual Labourers (6 March 1965)

 I wonder if its possible to date a comedy programme just by the quality of its laughter? Charlie Drake's antics and bon mots bring his studio audience to a collective ecstasy here, but there's something that you can hear in their laughter that disappears sometime in the 1970s. Maybe it’s their willingness to derive pleasure from, and to be genuinely surprised by, the most pedestrian reversals of expectation. There's one woman - or more likely, girl - in this audience with a very noticeable high-pitched squeak of a laugh, whose sense of humour can be traced throughout the whole show. She seems to find some sort of release through Drake's performance, and I increasingly started to speculate about who she might have been and what her life might have been like as the business on screen ground onwards.

 There are a few odd of-their-time concerns and attempts at off-the-wall satire in the set-up of the Worker's assignment this week, at a large anonymous corporation which exists to make people happy ("S.U.Y.P. - Send Us Your Problems"), where Drake gets hailed as a Chauncey Gardiner-type seer. I'm not sure that this gels at all well with Drake's slapstick and mawkish irritating man persona, really, although the set for the S.U.Y.P. reception is an unexpectedly impressive marvel of depth and perspective.