Why I am turning to the late Sir Ken Dodd for a little light in dark times - Sarah Todd

Apart from minor irritations, such as the price of food and drink, this week’s Great Yorkshire Show ranks as a happy place for yours truly. As comfortably familiar as the bright pink trainers that thanks to more casual fashion can nowadays be got away with on the hallowed Harrogate showground.

As an aside, something that always used to make me smile was my late grandmother remembering the old wooden members’ pavilion and how some farming families would have their older unmarried daughters dressed up to the nines in the hope of catching the eye of a potential husband.

Straw hats and pretty dresses were certainly de rigueur for a day at the show during this reporter’s younger years. Just writing about it now brings back happy memories. It was a much more innocent time in that our young lives weren’t ruled by wearing a certain brand name or style. We chose what we liked and thought looked nice and nine times out of ten that didn’t involve either looking like everybody else or spending a fortune.

Nowadays, just look around, and the young agricultural set will be sporting identikit fleece gilets at around £200 a pop, with girls in spray-on tight white jeans or miniskirts (whatever their figure shape) and deck shoes. Maybe a flowery dress, which looks lovely, but more often than not the same make as everybody else’s and marked out as such with a blingy belt bearing a logo. Individuality in clothes (and thought) seems to have been lost over the years.

In mitigation it must have been the 1980s, but even after about 40 years the recollection of turning up at the show in a pale lime green rara skirt still sends a shudder down the spine. A lesson learned that what might have been cool at the school disco didn’t make the sartorial switch into countryside clobber.

It may well have been Chancellor Rachel Reeves openly crying last week during Prime Minister's Questions in the House of Commons that got the old cogs whirring about happiness.

She certainly looked anything but. Although Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch maybe didn’t quite get it right in how she tore into her teary state it was certainly all a rum going on.

Playing politics with people’s lives and livelihoods is bound to take its toll but it’s hard to show sympathy towards somebody who has acted in such a cold and callous way towards those impacted by her robotic rulings.

Perhaps our leaders also need to be reminded about happiness and some simple steps about achieving it.

Being kind would have to be up there, along with not being jealous. Fiscal attacks on those who have worked hard and have savings, property or land somehow smack of the green-eyed monster.

Some Minister was on the news the other day going on about how Britain needs to breed more children. Now hang on madam, the falling birth rate is one thing - but actively encouraging people to have kids without any kind of caveat about being able to pay for their upkeep first rather than sponging off the state seems rather an important omission.

Oh no, getting hot under the collar and happiness levels have plummeted again.

Best rewind to happier thoughts and where better to look for inspiration than where we began with Ken Dodd.

He spoke about a rainbow of laughter and the ultimate being white at the very top, the sort to be heard in a school playground. Then, further down, the different colours such as yellow for clownish humour and red for gags about romance and relationships such as the mother-in-law. Further down are darker colours of satire and cynicism, still good for laughs but not as pure as the icing on the cake, the white laughter.

So that’s the holy grail we should be aspiring to and oh what joy it would be to hear him crack just one last taxman-related yoke, to stick the proverbial two tickling sticks up at Ms Reeves and all the stress she has put so many sectors of society - not least the farming core of this week’s Great Yorkshire Show - under.