Skip to main content

The best in period drama. Period.

The award-winning drama Mad Men, set in a New York ad agency in the early 1960s, is great on social history. There's been plenty of commentary about the role of women in the office, the obsessive smoking and boozing of nearly all the characters and the beautiful period costumes and furnishings. For me, though, it's the incidental asides that are the most shocking.

I think I may have blogged before about a scene in which creative director Don Draper takes his family on a picnic. He and wife Betty think nothing of abandoning all their rubbish on the ground. After all, America's a big country, eh? If people don't like the litter, they can go picnic somewhere else.

In another episode from Season 2, which I've just watched on the BBC iPlayer, account man Pete Campbell returns from a convention in Los Angeles and tells colleagues about his experiences. There's this very odd moment in which you realise they're talking about the west coast of America as if it's a foreign country. It's much more than straightforward east-west cultural differences. It's a reflection of the fact that, by and large, people were not making three-hour plane trips across the States at the time. No one else had been there.

Ageing art man Salvatore said that he'd like to meet the people for himself. Pete admitted he was glad to be home. I guess NYC must have seemed kind of reassuring.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

A Fawlty Towers script? Si, senor!

Ok, so I gave ChatGPT the following scenario: "Imagine a theatrical script for a situation comedy set in a hotel in Torquay, England. The proprietor is called Basil, an eccentric man who believes the calibre of guests to be low. His wife, Sybil, is often frustrated by Basil's incompetence. They employ a Spanish waiter called Manuel, who struggles to understand English. Basil suspects that two guests, who claim to be married, may be lying." Here's what our favourite AI came up with: Scene: The hotel lobby in Torquay, England. Basil is standing behind the reception desk, looking at a piece of paper. Sybil is standing next to him, looking annoyed. Manuel is hovering nearby, trying to look busy. Basil: (to Sybil) I don't know why we get such low-calibre guests at this hotel. Look at these two - Mr. and Mrs. Smith. They claim to be married, but I suspect they might be lying. Sybil: (sighing) Basil, it's not our job to judge the marital status of our guests. Just m...

Becoming a Twister board

I spent yesterday evening in an old factory building off Brick Lane playing kids' games with an organisation called Fun Fed. The idea is that a bunch of adults get together and act like children for a couple of hours. We played tag and stuck big coloured discs on ourselves so that we could become human Twister mats. There was an awful lot of running around and I was thinking that I ought to get to aikido a bit more often. Being a child is very hard work.

It's been a tough year. Let's give ourselves a clap.

If something didn’t smell right about the UK handling of the pandemic, the British public was never going to notice. But they knew that if they couldn’t smell something, they really ought to get a Covid test sent to them in the post. There has been something incredibly British about the DIY swabs and their delivery via the gig-economy workers of Amazon, hasn’t there? Touch of corona? I’ll pop something in the post to you. Should be with you tomorrow. I suppose it was inevitable that we’d need some new kind of system. After all, the coronavirus outbreak was the first thing in the history of the NHS that couldn’t be cured by paracetamol, rest and plenty of fluids. This understandably left GPs flummoxed and anxious. The UK decided pretty early on that if you were ill with a novel pathogen – which proved deadly in maybe 1% of cases – you really shouldn’t go to the doctor. You should STAY AT HOME and spread it quickly to your flatmates or family members. And because they were now at ...