Male order | 31 March 2012

I suspect that, when men and women watch Mad Men, they see very different things. Women probably see a witty indictment of male patriarchy. I, on the other hand, see Heaven on Earth. Everything shown on Mad Men is what male dinosaurs like me expect from western civilisation: liquid lunches, beautiful secretaries, exquisite suits and witty conversation. Alas, all of this is absent from the 21st-century workplace. Nowadays, downing half the contents of a bottle of Canadian Club whiskey in the middle of a business meeting can be a sackable offence.

Mad Men returned to our screens on Tuesday night (Sky Atlantic) with a two-hour special. For those who care about plot, it’s now 1966 and the Sterling, Cooper, Draper and Pryce ad agency is still in business. Don Draper has married his secretary, Megan, and is having difficulty coping with the big ‘four-o’. She throws a party for him and he is embarrassed by all the fuss. To lighten the mood, Megan performs a lap dance. Don is disgusted with her public sensuality and poor Megan has to win him back with some class-A super sex. No girl can keep up Megan’s level of vim for long, which is why that marriage isn’t going to last the season.

Meanwhile, Joan Harris is frustrated at how much her new baby is distracting her from work — a story nicely juxtaposed with that of Pete Campbell, who also has a new infant but who can farm it out to his wife at will. The firm is pushing hard for a contract with Heinz baked beans, but Peggy Olson’s idea of a ‘ballet of beans’ doesn’t go down well with the Heinz executives. Lane Pryce, a recent addition to the agency’s staff and painfully English to boot (which, inevitably, marks him out as a weirdo), finds a wallet with a picture of a woman inside it and decides to pursue her.