The meritocracy of <em>Mad Men</em>

The second season of Mad Men launches tonight on BBC4 (and, more sumptuously still, on BBC HD).

Today’s Times has a timely interview with both Mary Wells Lawrence and Charlotte Beers, both two legendary Mad Women in their day. Wells Lawrence is fairly disdainful of the series – not only are the people not rich enough, she says, but it needn’t really be about advertising at all: “It’s just a narrative about people – you could have set it in a hedge fund.”

She has a point. There are some inaccuracies and fanciful inventions, not least of them being the title, a phrase I had never before heard in twenty years working at Ogilvy. And yet an ad agency is in many ways a more interesting and amusing standpoint from which to see than era than almost anywhere else. The charming optimism about technological progress; the social assumptions and generalisations; the smoking and the sheer wonderful self-indulgence of the era are far better conveyed from an agency than from a law firm.