May 11, 2008

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.

2 comments:

RFB said...

You surely live in a castle. And the children you refer to as the Chimplets are really darling little moppets who attend private school and have a nanny. You arrive to Giraffe Towers in a chauffeured Bentley, driven by your man-servant Giles. You have a mistress you keep at a swanky apartment in London, and you often play cricket and polo with the Princes. You summer in the South of France and you wear goggles when you ride your vintage Triumph to your second home "in the country."

Do not attempt to spoil our vision of Brits again, please.

SchizoFishNChimps said...

Well, there's always the Oirish