The Worker (1965–1970) User Reviews

Rescued from the vaults

[leema-2 · 8/10 · 6 June 2007]

Well, it's taken 37 years but this long-lost series has finally been released on DVD (UK, region 2) where it will hopefully recapture some of the recognition it deserves.

I must admit that not having seen the show since the callow days of my youth I wasn't sure it would hold up, but to my surprise and delight it's even funnier than I remember despite only being preserved on scratchy black and white 16mm telerecordings. The series is a curious mixture of stand-up, sitcom and surrealism, all held together by Drake's assured comic performances.

The basic format is simple enough. Charlie has been visiting his local Labour Exchange ever since the end of World War II, and in that time he's had over 900 jobs and lost every single one of them within days. At the start of each show his employment adviser (originally Mr. Whittaker, or as Charlie would have it "Whikatter", played by Percy Herbert; from season 2 onward Mr Pugh, or "Poo", played by Henry McGee) has to sit "patiently" through Charlie's unlikely tale of how he managed to get fired *this* time.

The rest of the show typically sees Charlie trying for yet another job and failing due to some bizarre combination of circumstances, returning to the Labour Exchange to harass his adviser once again. In later episodes the actual job-hunting theme was sometimes sidelined in favour of out-and-out surrealism, never more so than in the series 3 opener (and the only episode to survive in colour, albeit in a rough cut) "Hallo Cobbler", in which Charlie gets knocked on the head and has an increasingly strange set of hallucinations based on a story he told Mr. Pugh to explain a long absence. This culminates in a weird trial that turns into a musical number, in which Drake plays almost all the parts. The scene is every bit as funny and surreal as anything on Monty Python or The Goodies.

**Small spoiler warning**

When he wakes up Mr. Pugh tells Charlie how he came to be knocked out - his boomerang DID come back after all!

If black and white movies can be timeless classics, why not TV series?

[lee10538 · 18 December 2001]

This is a British comedy show I remember fondly from my childhood. Charlie Drake played a 'little man' character whose attempts to find an honest job were always scuppered by fate. Henry McGee, best known today for his appearances in The Benny Hill Show, was his long-suffering employment officer.

I would very much like to see this series again, if only to see if it's as good as I remember, but despite the proliferation of channels these days it seems as if nobody wants to show black and white series anymore. ITV, the network that commissioned the series, never shows anything over ten years old nowadays, and I'm not even sure the recordings still exist. Because Britain never had syndication (at least not until satellite TV provided something similar) old shows just weren't seen as having any commercial value and often got wiped. But if people regard black and white films like Casablanca as all-time classics, why shouldn't black and white TV shows be treated with the same respect?

Almost like Beckett

[kmoh-1 · 29 June 2017]

This is an extraordinary show. Charlie Drake was never a fashionable comedian, and some of his films are abysmally sentimental and childish. Yet this wonderful comedy, which ran for five series, about an accident-prone unemployable layabout contains some of the most inventive, stylised and downright weird sequences in British TV comedy. It is almost theatre of the absurd, as the inevitable course of events unfolds in a world where failure is the only outcome, propelled by the infernal machinery of the labour exchange. The gallows humour, tragicomic outlook, theatricality and bleak minimalism recall the works of Samuel Beckett more than Drake's variety-comedian peers. Realism of sets and costume are undermined by stylised dialogue, incessant repetition, absurd situations and Drake's constant breaking of the fourth wall, looking at camera and pretending to conduct the orchestra when the theme tune begins.

Each programme had the same structure. Charlie would enter the labour exchange, and explain to a long-suffering official why he had lost his last job. The official, a regular character, was Mister Pugh (Henry McGee) from the second series on, a wonderful piece of casting and a perfect foil for Drake, humourless, choleric and hysterical. Eventually, frustrated by Drake's rambling monologues, idiotic explanations, wilful stupidity and constant mispronunciation of his name (as 'Mi'tah Poo', which became a popular catchphrase in the 1960s), Mr Pugh would grab him by his dungarees, pull him physically off his feet and over the counter, and threaten him. He would finally give Charlie the address of a firm with a vacancy, usually telling him this was his last chance.

Charlie would turn up at the firm, and announce himself using the same words each time: "Good morning, I'm Charles Drake, casual labourer of Weybridge, come for the job in the vacancy". A surreal scene with a receptionist would usually follow, and we would have the commercial break.

In the second part of the show, Charlie would be introduced to his new boss, and proceed to make a hash of the job, usually wrecking the workplace. The comedy would be once more a strange contrast of traditional slapstick and stylised, satirical spoofs of current mores, be they management fads, silly fashions, current obsessions.

This really is a unique show. It has a cumulative effect - it is easier to 'get' what is going on if you watch more than one show. A single show in isolation appears to be completely mad.

Unemployable, but inimitable.

[robin-414 · 20 December 2005]

Astonished to find three episodes of this on an old videotape I bought the other day. Even more astonished that the first one on the tape was one that I actually remembered quite well from 1970. I wouldn't have believed that I saw it later than 1967, but a reference to 'Midnight Cowboy' places the recording date after 1969. I was a kid during this series' run, and could never get enough of Charlie Drake. He was a brilliant comic in both the physical and verbal sense, and I remember once seeing him carrying on with the comedy while bleeding from the head after jumping through a prop window (in an episode of this series). Each episode of The Worker adhered to a formula: Charlie strides into the Employment Exchange, makes a misery of the life of the official (Henry McGee, playing Mr Pugh, or 'Mister Poo' as Drake's character calls him), is sent to try out another job, fails with varying degrees of hilarity (so my memory informs me), then returns, apparently full of cheer that he is unemployable.

The stunts and slapstick seem eclipsed, at least in TV terms, by the later series 'Some Mothers do 'ave 'em', but it's fascinating to watch Drake and McGee performing their surreal double-headers. Drake is a species of his own, and the closest his character comes to anything resembling a human being, is a sort of overgrown mischievous baby, his brilliant blue eyes defying the monochrome medium. He has a language all his own, and it seems to have come more from a refusal to talk normally than an inability to do so (much more rebellious than the uniform slang used by teenagers).

I was hoping to show the tape to my 11-year-old stepson, who actually loves vintage comedy, but to be honest, there are many elements of the first episode that I found problematic. Charlie decides he wants a sex change - this is proposed from such an innocent angle ('cos I ain't done very well as a man!') that it's disarming, but a scene following an incident in which his clothes shrink in a car wash (causing him, for some reason, to be mistaken for a woman) is rather disturbing: he is waylaid by a gang of skinheads (who were, at that time, the emergent yob element - there had been a considerable lacuna since the decline of the teddyboy, and they had a lot of catching up to do), and it is quite clear ('just relax, darlin'') that their intention is rape. A farcical rescue has them each deposited in a dustbin, but the scene is much too menacing, and the intended juxtaposition of silly comedy doesn't cancel it out.

However, this is worth seeing, if you can track down the cassette (I don't know how many other episodes survived). Drake is supremely confident in his performance, and draws us onto his side to tease the long suffering Mr Pugh.

The closest talent I've seen to Drake in delivery and physicality in recent years is Lee Evans. Both stars are great when they're in the right setting, that is to say, contexts that use such tremendous energy to good effect. Anything else is a disaster.