Past perfect

Mad Men (BBC4)

You have neat, slicked-back hair which never gets dandruff. You keep a pile of beautifully laundered white shirts stacked in your office drawer. You look great in your sharp suit and so does everyone else in theirs. The girls in the office are there to service your every need, and actually discuss with one another tactics for making themselves look sexier and how to please you more.

You smoke ALL THE TIME — so incredibly often that people in the future are going to look at you and wonder how it can possibly be that you and your friends smoked so much — and you do it suavely, without guilt or fear, for cancer has barely been invented.

You can give girls’ buttocks an affectionate pat in the office and that’s OK because sexual harassment hasn’t been invented either. Girls dress in a pretty, feminine way and seem quite prim and demure, but underneath they’re really gagging for it. You’re so well paid you can live in a spacious, antiquey white house in a smart district, and you certainly don’t need a second income from your wife.

Your kids do what they’re told. Your wife is pretty, doesn’t at all mind if you work late (because that’s what men do) but is definitely up for a bit of how’s your father when you get home. Your mistress is bohemian, sassy, understanding, great in the sack but unlikely to rock the boat.

As you see, I’ve been trying hard to find a reason not to wish myself back in time as a senior creative at a top Madison Avenue advertising agency in 1960 and I can’t think of one. I don’t think Mad Men (BBC4, Sunday), the utterly brilliant new series by Matthew Weiner (writer and producer on the last three series of The Sopranos), can either — though it pretends to do so, a teeny bit, so as not to frighten the liberals.

It duly notes that black people are poor and downtrodden and only found in menial jobs such as waiting in smoky cocktail bars; that women are patronised; that gay men must hide their true nature; that casual anti-Semitism is rife. But it doesn’t stand in judgment or invite us to congratulate ourselves on how very far we’ve come, like some Polly Toynbee column.

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Denis Burke

March 7th, 2008 3:31pm Report this comment

I find it quite hard to fathom how one would conclude that the students of any university were more "class-war-y" than any other. Perhaps it's my own crude, red-brick background that sees this as utter rot, but might i say what a matchlessly exquisite pleasure it is to watch four students whose education must have cost the better part of a million pounds be oh-so-nearly chased down by Snotnose College. Up the North!