Arrays in Plugins

Hi,

This is my first Plugin – and is embarrassingly basic, but we’ve all got to start somewhere! All it does is return how many unique/individual commentors comment on a blog.

Problem is, I can’t get the result from the array. I’m using MySQL to do the maths for me, into a var named thecount


function wl_comment_count() {
global $wpdb;

$ccount = $wpdb->get_results("SELECT COUNT (DISTINCT comment_author_email) AS thecount FROM $wpdb->comments WHERE comment_approved = '1'");
if ($ccount) {

$totalcount = $ccount['thecount'];

} else {
$totalcount=0;
}
echo $totalcount;
}

The SQL is tried and tested – what am I doing wrong with the array?

Thanks

Will