Charles on… anything that comes along

William Leith - argh! flashback! - wrote a TV review in the Guardian the other day, talking about Mad Men (as in, the men who ruled Madison Avenue), and said

it’s a drama set in the early 1960s, when the world was simpler and less screwed up… It’s 1963, and the mad men are the ad men of Madison Avenue, in New York.

Lots of others are doing it. The Times:

a new US drama set in the world of advertising on Madison Avenue in the early 1960s

. (Not the Daily Mail, because it doesn’t do TV reviews.) The Telegraph:

Mad Men - set in the ruthless, febrile etc world of 1960s New York admen - is intended to fill this spring’s must-watch slot.

But unless a great deal of time has passed between the episode I’ve been watching and the one Leith’s reviewing (which is vaguely possible; I’m a couple of weeks behind), then that’s not possible.

Instead, it’s set fair and square in 1960. Not 1960s; 1960, the year. It’s easy to know why: because it’s got Nixon vs Kennedy. They talk about buying up ad space on TV in some states for haemorrhoid cream because that will mean Kennedy can’t buy those ad spots. That makes it summer-autumn of 1960, since the election is in November.

And when did Nixon battle Kennedy for the presidency? 1960. Kennedy was elected November 1960, gave his commencement speech January 1961, was shot in Dallas in November 1963.

Calling it “1960s” and suggesting that the behaviour being shown is “1960s” doesn’t ring quite right (assume for a moment that it *is* how guys and gals acted). After all, the beginning of every decade is always a hangover of the previous one. We didn’t discover the identity of this decade until after September 2001; in 2000 we were still reeling in the mad behaviour of the 1990s. Similarly, 1990 was the tail-end of the 1980s, not the opening up of what the 1990s became. 1980, believe me, was much more like 1979 than it was 1981.

Possibly those far-off dates are more resonant for me because of reading On Green Dolphin Street, Sebastian Faulks’s terrific novel about love that’s set all around that period; one of the principal characters is a newspaperman who listens to the Nixon-Kennedy debates on the radio, and thinks Nixon took it (and writes to that effect in the paper); whereupon he’s ribbed by his colleagues, who watched it on TV. Faulks adds detail - which has the resonance of truth - that Nixon was suffering from the reoccurence of an old back problem, which made standing for the debates painful.

(Though personally it feels like it was a much, much better thing that Kennedy won.)

Bonus link for those who’ve got this far and indulged my vague knowledge of US presidential stuff: Things Younger Than John McCain. The list includes nylon, the Golden Gate Bridge, duct tape, the AA 12 steps programme (Yo Bush!), TV commercials… the list is growing very, very quickly.

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• Finding a NNW bug (the tiniest), does Backup backup? and the slow train to Quicktime (18 October 2005; score: 20.76%)
• Patience, please.. (30 July 2005; score: 20.53%)
• Sudoku trivia.. what's the least numbers for a solvable grid without guesses? (17 May 2007; score: 19.49%)