THE punters in the "laughter workshop seemed deliriously happy. Lying on their backs, in a head to head circle on the floor, they formed a human cartwheel of cheerfulness. As chuckling and chortling escalated to convulsion, you almost expected the sweet whiff of best Moroccan to waft from the back of the telly. Sniff. Sniff. These were happy campers, alright. A combination of larks, Larrys and even pigs in ... well, you know ... could not have seemed happier.
But there were no drugs involved. Oxford psychologist Robert Holden runs his "laughter workshops" for gloomy types - punters with faces that would normally sour milk. None were clinically depressed but all had judged themselves to be "below average for happiness" and though cavilling (naturally), they had signed up with Happy Bob. QED: How To Be Happy followed three of the malcontents - Dawn Keith and Caroline.
Dawn is a private investigator in Devon and even though she lives overlooking a beach, she didn't quite have the PI bonhomie of Jim Rockford. In fact, Dawn yawn, was one long drink of water. Keith gave up his girl and his job as a salesman, but held on to his Daimler. Clearly, he had more money than solace and it was hard not to think that what he really needed was an almighty kick in the behind - a full blooded Bobby Charlton job.
And then there was Caroline. Poor, frumpy Caroline. For the last six years, she had worked as a full time carer for her invalided and less than grateful mother.
"The strain was beginning to show," said Felicity Kendal's voiceover. Indeed, it was. Caroline, according to Happy Bob's personality tests, was the unhappiest of all. She looked it too. With a pinched face and a pair of giant spectacles that would make Den is Taylor's look like contact lenses, she looked like she had been dragged backwards through briars.
Happy Bob's "laughter workshops" are like encounter groups, with lectures and general acting the maggot sessions thrown in. The sad folk are paired off to tell their partners about the things that make them happy. Often, there are long silences as each increases the suffering of the other. Slowly, however, Bob's therapy begins to work. It's impressive.
He tells the whingers to rid themselves of their fears about happiness. They list "simplistic naive; won't last; too self indulgent; won't be enough; should I be so happy?" as responses to the concept of happiness. He tells them that happiness is not something people "deserve, earn, work for or pay for". It has its own currency. Cut then to shrinks in America, who are doing physiological tests on the human brain.
"Happiness lights up the left pre frontal lobe," says the head shrink. Sure enough, under a brain scan, the left pre frontal lobe glows like a pinball machine when a happy camper is scanned. "We've found what the psychologists have been calling `cerebral joy juice'," adds the happy shrink. They plot graphs of "positive" and "negative" brain activity. Caroline, pre Happy Bob's course, is a sad puppy indeed.
Exercise and laughter are recommended to improve mood and mental health. "Laughter is a sort of internal aerobics," said one Yank. (I was quite happy until that sort of guff was introduced.) Realistic goal setting by the minute, if necessary; by the hour; the day; the week; the month; the year and so forth was also deemed to be crucial to maintaining happiness. Cut back to Happy Bob's group, lying on the floor, stoned on their own high spirits.
The therapy was spectacularly successful, though Dawn and Keith suffered severe mood swings after a few weeks and almost gave up. But Caroline - glamorous Caroline of the specs free, gamey eye and bubbly personality, was transformed. The American shrink took another graph. "Your brain is now one of the happiest ever seen," he told her. "It's nearly off the scale." She giggled and then purred.
Certainly, Happy Bob has gone some way to unlocking the secret of happiness. Six months after their training course, the punters were still beaming. It would seem that, fundamentally, happiness is an attitude fostered by self esteem, but by not seeing yourself as the centre of the universe too often. On the evidence of this documentary, Bob can feel happy that millions of sad cases will be moaning all the way to Oxford to get a place in his "laughter workshops". Fair enough - even though something tells me that superabundant happiness is a depressing prospect.
ANYWAY, there were few happy faces in Roger Roger, a pilot comedy drama written by John Sullivan, the creator of Only Fools And Horses. Set in and around a London mini cab office, the gloom was understandable as a cast of losers steered a fleet of old jokes up most of comedy's culs de sac. Neil Morrissey, of Men Behaving Badly infamy, was the central character: a wannabe rock star who wants to exchange mini cabs for mega gigs.
Morrissey is part of the reigning ladocracy on British television. Lads in comedy, lads on chat shows, lads on game shows - the game is played out, lads. Nicknamed Bonio (a sarcastically laddish play on Bono) by the other mini cab lads, Morrisey's character is 32. He has a wife and two daughters. He talks to posters of rock stars. His wife freaks.
Bonio is a waster, but he's a waster in the modern tradition of being a man with a boy within. Proper, old fashioned wasters were men with wasters within. There was some honour in the job, or lack of a job. No apologising. No sentimental nonsense. Wasters knew where they stood and took the consequences. Beside this modern crowd, who have to be explained, the traditional waste was a noble figure: sponging without simpering.
But lad wasters are a pathetic crowd. Bonio gets a call to pick up a fare, who turns out to be the nymphomaniac wife of one of his rock idols. She tries to pick him up instead, dressing up as a 2,000 year old (she looks it too) Egyptian priestess. She wears a full length cloak with nothing underneath and flashes at Bonid. He freaks and bolts for his cab. The genuine waster would have been in like Flynn.
When the rock star hears of his wife's gig with Bonio, he has the lad worked over. Still, Bonio idolises the rock creep. Audience reaction will determine whether or not Roger Roger is made into a series. It probably will be, because: Morrissey is hugely popular at the moment. But this lad lark has become boring. Clearly, judging by the sales of lad mags, laddism is far from over - but its days as a theme for TV humour should be.
THERE was even less to be happy about down in Tralee. After another six hours of ersatz Celtic wholesomeness, there can be no doubt that the Rose of Tralee is not only wilting, but withering. This was its 38th edition and really, if it is to survive as anything other than laughing stock television, it needs pruning.
Without the wave of public goodwill which he enjoyed last year, when he replaced Gay Byrne at short notice, Derek Davis struggled a little this time. His jokes seemed too rehearsed and his ad libs a touch acerbic. But Davis is not the problem with this show. Neither are the women. The gig itself is an anachronistic artifice. It is more cult than culture and in its designer coyness and pasteurised pomp, it resists the real "real" Ireland.
A festival aiming to celebrate the Irish diaspora cannot but be self indulgent. That part is understandable. Even sentimentality has a role to play. But when you see the structure of the gig and consider how the contestants are nudged towards behaving as though they lived in the 1950s, it is clear that the show is the most smug propaganda. The unashamed "observing" of the women, reeks of Valley Of The Squinting Windows prurience.
The truth is - and everybody knows it - that most of the contestants are modern, tippified young ones: Where you get Roses, you get briars and that's reality. But this festival aims to sanitise reality, to present a moralising, self congratulatory picture of Ireland. It's always been like that, but in recent years the gap between the artifice and the truth has grown so large that the Rose Of Tralee is now as far out as Star Trek. Beam some reality into it, Scotty - or let it die with whatever shreds of dignity it might possibly have left.
FINALLY, two nostalgia efforts - The Carpenters: Yesterday Once More and Picture This: Remember Albert. The former looked back on the sibling duo, Richard and Karen, whose music was big with the schmaltziest bedsit sensitives back in the 1970s. Karen Carpenter died of anorexia in 1983, but no examination of why she suffered from this disease interrupted the dewy eyed reminiscences of the likes of Herb Alpert, John Denver, Burt Bacharach and the Carpenters' mother.
The programme exuded the characteristically American sentiment of controlled gushing: the emotional equivalent of soft focus photography. Burt and Herb and John were smiley and sincere, in a showbiz way, as they recalled the Carpenters' heyday. The music was so sweet that it could make your teeth zing. America has its Roses of Tralee too.
Remember Albert was a grittier affair altogether. The Albert in question was Albert Johanneson, the former Leeds United soccer star. In 1965, Johanneson, a South African, became the first black footballer to play in an FA Cup Final. A few months ago, he died in a public toilet in Leeds. He was there for days before he was found. He had become alcoholic and derelict. It was an affecting documentary, largely because I do remember Albert. Strangely enough, he always looked very happy back then.