Fantasy Sixties

After running a Sky+ series link on Mad Men, I finally started catching up on it last week, with about another 4 episodes to go before I'm up to date with the UK schedules. I thought it was going to be crap, but it's really rather good, and is right out of the Dick Van Dyke Scriptwriters School.
If you're watching series 2 of Heroes, you'll know what I mean: we see the US idea of Telly Ireland Gangsters. Begorrah ohr shet ets fecken rainen t'besure. The same school is responsible for Telly London, where St. Paul's is a stroll away from Greenwich Park, which nestles beneath the Tower of London, and has pubs under fog-shrouded bridges where the locals wear flat caps and red neck scarves and raise a pint to the portrait of the Queen behind the bar. Have I mentioned that I live in a castle?
These phenomena exist because of a simple unifying fact: the writers have never bloody well been there. Thus with Mad Men, the central character is a well groomed cold-hearted shit, cast from a JR Ewing template. The storylines are compelling because they are set in a Telly Sixties world combined with a Reading Level Z version of what the ad world was like back then. Still, it's oddly compelling. I hope that at some point someone, anyone, twats that Donnie Darko or whatever his name is, firmly on the nose, for the sake of his poor missus.