Fact: in 1963, air travel was so new and exciting that the awed gasps of the passengers as the plane took flight frequently drowned out the noise of the jet engines.
Fact: in 1963, air travel was so comfortable that passengers emerged from long-haul flights even more refreshed, relaxed and cheerful than when they boarded the plane. Instead of taking their suits to the dry cleaners, canny travellers of the day would often just take a plane journey instead, knowing that their clothes would emerge at the end more pressed and immaculate than before.
Fact: in 1963, every woman looked and dressed like Jackie Kennedy, especially air stewardesses, all of whom could have doubled as models because they were just so hot.
Well, at least it’s all true if you believe the BBC’s new Mad-Men-in-the-air series Pan Am (BBC2, Wednesday). But you know, I’m not necessarily sure that I do. There’s a vogue at the moment for lovingly realised, über-authentic screen hommages to the Sixties and Seventies, but the line between ingeniously constructed verisimilitude and ludicrous pastiche is very thin. I fear Pan Am may have crossed it right from episode one.
To give you a recent film example of how easily these period recreations can go wrong, let me cite the Extra Strong Mint scene in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. The director Tomas Alfredson is probably the world’s greatest master of retro porn chic — cf. his magnificently convincing evocation of early-Eighties suburban Stockholm in Let the Right One In — and his le Carré adaptation (setting aside for a moment Gary Oldman’s beyond-bad George Smiley) looks to be evoking period and place just as impressively, till the scene right at the end when Alfredson blows it for the sake of a sweet packet.
Clearly, Alfredson has gone to a lot of trouble to find exactly the right kind of Extra Strong Mints Smiley would have had in his pocket in 1974. Problem is, he can’t quite resist rubbing in the fact, with disastrous consequences. It’s a moment of high tension: Karla’s mole is about to be unearthed; the camera lingers just a little too long on the Extra Strong Mints packet with which Smiley is fumbling nervously. And that’s it: the magic is broken, the fourth wall has been breached. Instead of thinking what you’re supposed to be thinking, what you’re actually thinking is, ‘Oooh. Look at that Extra Strong Mint packaging. What lovingly realised period detail…’
In Pan Am, though, this sort of thing happens not once but in pretty much every frame. One early scene, for example, in which a grande-dame stickler of a supervisor inspects and weighs the air stewardesses, is clearly constructed around the fact that they all had to wear girdles then and that their uniforms were more fitted and standards much higher than they are today. Well, fine. But rather than just drop this stuff in lightly and allow us to notice it for ourselves, we have to suffer about three pointed girdle references and a billion close-ups of stewardess bottoms waggling extra perkily beneath cinched waists and immaculate uniforms. It’s too much.
Perhaps this would be less of a problem if the characterisation weren’t so cartoonish. The jockish, ludicrously good-looking young pilots reminded me of the space marines in Paul Verhoeven’s gloriously kitsch, pastichey Starship Troopers, while among the females there’s an oh-so-French one (cos French girls are sophisticated and sexy, don’t you know), a posh English one with the acting power and charisma of Catherine Oxenberg in Dynasty, and the one who is a spy.
Why is she a spy? Well, presumably because the production team thought to themselves — not unreasonably — ‘Yikes. The interiors of planes flying back and forth across the Atlantic and the interiors of sumptuous hotels in the grand capitals of Europe might grow a little wearing for viewers after a time. We’d better come up with some clever, plot-up-spicing device, sharpish.’
But I’m not sure they need have bothered. People like me — floating voters: ones with lives and standards — are going to suss pretty quickly that this is a very poor man’s Mad Men and won’t last much beyond the first episode. The series’ natural constituency, on the other hand, will stay loyal regardless of how feeble the storylines are or how shallow the characters, because they’re in it for the style and the escapism.
The escapism bit comes from being wafted comfortably back to an era where you didn’t have to take off your belt and shoes or be herded like veal calves at the airport and then spend every other second of your flight dreading the cry of ‘Allahu Akbar’ from the man in the row in front with the flaming suicide pants.
And the style bit, well, that’s obvious. Pan Am is designed for the kind of people who can gaze for a whole hour at women in pill-box hats and women dressed like Thunderbirds pilots and concierges in grand hotels and people drinking cappuccino in Sixties Italian cafés and cars with fins on them without once being bored even if nothing of interest happens in between. That’ll be gay men and straight women, then. And they’re welcome to it.
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