'People really needed convincing that they wanted me'

We know him as Don Draper, the misogynistic, chain-smoking, hard-drinking Sixties advertising man at the centre of the brilliant TV show Mad Men. But it took Jon Hamm seven auditions to land the part and he'd been toiling in Hollywood bit parts (and worse) for years, reports Chrissy Iley

There are many things to love about Mad Men. Its impeccable style - the suits, the martinis, the ashtrays. The lighting (fluorescent office, amber nightclub), the permanent halo of smoke, the way women wear corsetry to work and are revered and despised in equal parts, the sexualised selling of ideas - all are period-perfect. It's a Polaroid of the advertising world of early Sixties Manhattan on Madison Avenue. It is politically incorrect and recreates an era where great change was about to happen but had not happened yet. It has the repression of the Fifties more than the swing of the Sixties. At the heart of the drama is Don Draper, rarely without a chunky glass of bourbon in one hand and a cigarette in the other. He has a Grace Kelly-style wife, a beatnik mistress and another lover, a gorgeous Jewish woman from the Upper East Side.

Draper is played by Jon Hamm. This year, he won the Golden Globe for best actor ahead of Hugh Laurie (House) and Jonathan Rhys Meyers (The Tudors). He is 37 and is being compared with George Clooney, who was about that age when he got his ER break and had similarly been toiling unnoticed in lesser-known US series.

I am waiting for Hamm in a cafe in Silver Lake, a boho-chic part of LA, wondering what he is going to look like without the suit and Brylcreemed hair. And here he is, as tall, lean and buff as could be in jeans, battered navy polo shirt, all unshaven and solicitous. How is my jetlag? How is my life? He recommends Devil's Nest, a scramble of avocado, sour cream, spicy sausage. Hamm is not self-consciously Hollywood, showy or full of himself, which probably comes from several years working at the coalface of showbusiness and before that as a waiter and a teacher. 'I taught daycare when I was in college. I taught after-school stuff for little kids.

'I was a theatre major in college and they didn't prepare you for the massive amount of rejection you have to go through. Most people who are successful, like George Clooney and Brad Pitt, had to eat shit at a lot of auditions and still not get the parts. So you have to develop resilience. Especially for Mad Men, where it took seven auditions to get the part. People really needed convincing that they wanted me.'

The show was created and written by Matthew Weiner who was a writer and producer on The Sopranos. He pushed for Hamm despite the cable network's nervousness because this was the cable channel AMC's first foray into drama series and it wanted the security of a star name.

Hamm had been a regular for three years on a show called The Division. 'It was on a network called Lifetime, which is soft programming for women. It was a cop show, five women and me, but the women got to be much more macho than me. I was the slightly emasculated cop; now I get to be a little more masculine,' he says. But, he shrugs, he's no alpha male. 'I was raised by a single mother and I've been in a 10-year relationship with my girlfriend. My whole life I've been surrounded by women.'

Does he at all resemble the slick but haunted ad man Don Draper? 'The closest thing I have in common with Don is that I'm looking for something. If you look at the literature of the early Sixties, like Cheever and Updike, it's existentialist. People sitting around smoking, thinking 'what am I doing with my life?'. Postwar America was riding as high as it's ever ridden. It had an incredibly paternalistic sense of its place in the world. America was the good cop. It healed Japan after it had utterly destroyed it, protected the world from communism. Americans had money, ability to travel and see the world. And at the core of it was: I'm still not happy. What Don Draper is doing is trying to sell happiness because he can't buy it himself. I think that resonates.'

The eggs arrive and he eats heartily. Does he smoke as much as Draper? 'I gave up 10 years ago when I started teaching kids. I don't miss the hacking cough in the morning or the mouth that tastes like cat litter, but I miss it when I'm on this show. It's glamorous, I got to tell you. [They smoke a non-nicotine herbal blend.] In the show, we know smoking kills, but we don't give a shit. These guys had three-martini lunches... I appreciate alcohol. I love the place that alcohol holds in our society, but I'd never attempt to drink as much as Draper.'

Hamm may relate to the smoking and the drinking, but not to the way the women are treated. He is devoted to his girlfriend, the actress and writer Jennifer Westfeldt, while Draper and his colleagues spend most of their time humiliating women when they are not sleeping with them and even when they are. They refer to Peggy, his frumpy secretary, as 'a lobster. All the meat in the tail'. At one point, Draper says to one of his inamoratas: 'What you call love was invented by guys like me to sell nylons.'

Draper sells lies for a living. He cheats. He is emotionally withholding, morally ambiguous, with a past he can't face up to, yet we can't help rooting for him. There's a genius in this portrayal. Hamm stares into his Devil's Nest. 'There's a vicarious thrill in it. When we see people misbehave, sometimes we want them to get away with it. I've gotten away with a lot in my life. The older you get the more you realise you're not getting away with it, it's taking its toll somewhere. So you try not to put yourself in those situations. Part of the mysterious process called growing up. Some people do that better than others. It's a daily struggle, especially in this city where everyone is a child and often rewarded for it.'

I tell him I cannot imagine him as a child. 'Well, I was forced to grow up very early because I lost my mother when I was 10. So that tends to take a lot of childhood out of the equation and you become very aware of adult things.' Hamm's parents divorced when he was two and he lived with his mother. 'She died suddenly over the course of about three months. A stomach ache one day turned out to be an advanced cancer that spread rapidly through her internal organs. She had two-thirds of her colon removed and it killed her.

'When you are 10, you just don't have the tools to process it. You're coming home from playing kick-ball to talks about how they've got to set you up a trust fund [which paid for his high-school education]. I do have very good memories of being a kid running around, but that all pretty much got lost. It was hard to bounce back from losing my mum. It's an incredibly tough process and you see a lot of that in Don as well. His childhood was... ' He searches for the word. Tortured? 'Yeah.' This would be the moment where Don Draper would light a cigarette and smoke the pain away. Hamm dips his sourdough into his eggs and swills it about.

It must have been strange suddenly to go and live with his father? 'Sort of. Though I loved my dad and I would see him every other weekend. It wasn't like he was a guy I didn't know. He had not remarried, but he had two children from a previous marriage, one of whom was living with him, as well as my 80-year-old grandmother. My dad was in many ways essentially Don Draper. A businessman in the Sixties, very powerful, self-assured. I didn't find out about that when I was a kid. He passed away when I was 20. We didn't have a chance for many adult discussions or to deal with each other as adults. He was sick for several years. He just degenerated over the last couple of years until he passed away. He packed a lot into his 63 years. It was a hard life.'

Hamm came west to LA from St Louis in 1995, prepared for hard work. 'I tried to get my affairs in St Louis in order the last year I was there, but I was never very good with money and by the end of the summer I had saved only $150. Fortunately, gas was cheaper then and I made it here in my car. The car died an interesting death. I had $1,600 of parking tickets accrued in my first four or five years here and the good people of Los Angeles decided to take the car back on their own.'

In Los Angeles he lived in a big house, just down the road from where we are having breakfast, with four other guys. In those days, the eastern district of Silver Lake was not cool or sought-after. It was rough. 'It was a crazy house and it was so cheap even I could afford it. An 85-year-old woman owned the house. She was a soap actress who lived in New York and we were four guys, my size and bigger. But we broke so many pieces of furniture, these little-old-lady chairs you would sit on and they would crack. Plus we would have parties and the keg would leak. It was my job as the diplomat of the group to say to her, "Marilyn, we love you" and make her feel good. I was always the one who was behind on the rent. I was very proud that once I started working I was able to pay her back completely.'

Hamm now lives just down the road in his own place with his girlfriend. 'We met through some mutual friends at somebody's birthday party. We didn't really hit it off immediately. She thought I was a cocky asshole.'

Soon after, she called him from New York to ask if he would come over and work on a project with her. It started off as a sketch. She thought maybe it would be a play and it turned into the critically acclaimed movie Kissing Jessica Stein in 2001. 'I was working downtown as a set dresser for some very bad softcore porn when I got the call from New York. I was making $150 a day and my friend was the electrician, so we would share a ride to work. I would carry my little bucket around and move what needed to be moved, but I would be terrible at it. I would fall asleep in a corner and they could never find me. So when I got the call, even though we had not particularly hit it off, I was like, yes, anything but this. I had no money, no car and all these parking tickets. Anything to get out of here.

'I borrowed the money from a friend and went to New York and we did this cool little play which turned into Kissing Jessica Stein. That's when Jen and I became really close. A year after that, we started going out and that was 10 years ago. We just had our anniversary in Mexico. We had a blast. We very much complement each other in this insane industry. We live and we work it out together. It's been great.'

It sounds as if she was a grounding force in his life? 'It's hard when you move cities and don't have a lot of friends and you're just trying to keep your head above water and trying not to get caught up in all this bullshit, to go out on auditions and not be totally soul-crushed when you don't get it. Especially out here, especially in the television industry where they dangle all this in front of you...

'And then they pull it back at the last second every time. How many more times am I going to be like Charlie Brown trying to kick the football and have them pull it away again? A lot of people after five or six times think, this is not for me, I'm done. It is so arbitrary and capricious.'

'Eventually I got there. Everybody on Mad Men is at the top of their game and it feels great.' And is he happy? 'Absolutely I am. I have a pretty stable relationship that brings me love and happiness and comfort. I have a great house and a great dog.' He shows me a picture of a dog wearing a baseball cap. What about babies? 'I don't necessarily want kids. A lot of our friends are having children and I don't know if it's for me. I haven't come down hardcore on either side of the argument. I think when people come from a stable family having children becomes a celebration and I'm not sure it would be that way for me.' And perhaps, for the moment, being the main guy in the best show on TV is enough. 'It doesn't suck,' he admits.

With that, he picks up the bill for breakfast as if that's perfectly normal when, in fact, it's unheard of. No Hollywood actor has even bought me a chai latte before. And then he offers to drive me home, as he doesn't want me to wait and call a taxi. I live half an hour away. We sit in his car listening to Steve Jones on the radio. How much better can it be?

Slices of Hamm: His life story

Early years
Born 10 March 1971 in St Louis, Missouri. His mother died when he was 10, his father when he was 20.

Career
1995 Moves to Los Angeles.
2000 First TV role, as a firefighter in NBC's Providence.
2001 Starred alongside his girlfriend, actress Jennifer Westfeldt, in Kissing Jessica Stein.
2008 Wins best actor Golden Globe for his role as Don Draper in Mad Men.

He says: 'I'm not the kind of actor that craves attention 24-7 - but it's part of the deal. You're the leader on the set.'

They say: 'The sexual politics are remarkable; the sex is even more interesting, and the hot centre of it all is Jon Hamm.' Salon.com, which last year voted Jon Hamm the sexiest man alive.

Mad Men, and why we love 1960

The sexist mores of Mad Men, the latest American television hit, are shocking – so why does a period piece set in 1960 look so seductive? Because the people it shows were the masters of the modern universe argues Bryan Appleyard.

"This place," observes Don Draper, creative director of the Madison Avenue advertising agency Sterling Cooper, “has more failed artists and intellectuals than the Third Reich.” It is 1960, and although the Sterling Cooper staff may have failed as artists and intellectuals, as ad men they are masters of the universe. And that is exactly why they were all invented by Matthew Weiner for his television-drama series Mad Men. It was, Weiner has said, “an amazing year”, and advertising was an amazing business. “The truth is, I think an advertising agency is one of the last places in the world where, if you bring in a big client, you’re in charge. There’s complete mobility, and it’s a model for the United States.”

The year is crucial. Nixon is about to lose to Kennedy, and America is feeling pretty good about herself. They liked Ike, the paranoia of the immediate postwar years had begun to subside and the suburbs had become happy havens of prosperity, and, for when they weren’t, the tranquilliser Librium, the Prozac of the age, had just come on the market. Best of all, the year before, the ad agency Doyle Dane Bernbach (DDB) had produced what was, in 1999, to be voted the greatest ad campaign of all time. It nicknamed Volkswagen’s little car the Beetle and showed it almost lost in a blank white page, with the slogan “Think Small”. Everything about this ad went against conventional wisdom: it wasted space, it sold a car as small when Americans liked big and it gave it an apparently demeaning name. Yet it turned Volkswagen into one of the world’s biggest car-makers. The concept of the ad man as a creative genius, not just a salesman, had been born.


He was also world-transforming. The idea that capitalism needs the manipulation of the mass mind to ensure that people will buy products even when - or especially when - they don’t need them was an old one, even by then. Edward Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud, had sold the subconscious as the malleable source of all our impulses to the Americans in the 1920s. Deliberately influencing the subconscious was not only good for business, it was, claimed Bernays, necessary for the workings of democracy. Advertising and public relations soothed and managed the rage, aspirations, suffering and happiness of the masses.

Amid the relative peace and absolute prosperity of the 1950s, this was an idea whose time had come. Democracy and the good life meant consumption - something we could do much better than the Soviets. In order to consume, you needed to be told what to consume. Advertising would win the cold war. No wonder Weiner’s Mad Men think they are the centre of the world. They are. Weiner wrote his first script for the series seven years ago and sent it to David Chase, creator of The Sopranos. Chase at once hired him to work on The Sops. Then, with that show finally out of the way, Weiner was free to go back to Mad Men. First aired in America in July last year, it has already picked up two Golden Globes and several other awards.

Apart from a few old ad men grumbling “It wasn’t like that”, the series has been universally acclaimed. But what, exactly, it’s about is puzzling. There are two views. Most of the American coverage has focused on how different Weiner’s 1960 seems from the way we live now. It is a costume drama, a period piece. On the other hand, Weiner himself has insisted that this is not merely a condescending look back at a quaint and distant past. “You tell me if this is a period piece,” he has said. “The men are asking, ‘Is this it?’ The women are asking, ‘What’s wrong with me?’ You tell me if that sounds like it’s 1960 or 2007.” Mad Men is not a window onto the past, it’s a mirror of the present. It’s the tension between these two views that makes the show so enthralling.

It’s a tension within Weiner himself, for the truth is he’s being more than a little disingenuous in denying the period quality of the show. In fact, Mad Men bends over backwards to draw your attention to the differences between then and now. “There were seven deadly sins practised at the dawn of the 1960s,” wrote Alessandra Stanley in The New York Times. “Smoking, drinking, adultery, sexism, homophobia, antisemitism and racism. In its first few minutes, Mad Men... taps into all of them.”

Weiner plainly delights in shocking us with the sights and sounds of a different world. A Jewish client is a big problem for the agency - they have to seek out the one Jew they employ to make her feel at home. They hit the booze tray from late morning onwards. Gays are invisible, in the closet; and the girls are grateful there are men at IBM smart enough to design an electric typewriter simple enough for women to use. The perception of risk is downright weird. A little girl walks in with a plastic laundry bag over her head and gets told off by her mother for messing up her wardrobe.

But the really big shockers are the cigarettes. Everybody smokes all the time, including a doctor while conducting a gynaecological examination. When the hands of the hero, the creative director Don Draper (Jon Hamm), are in shot, they’re holding a fag; when they’re not, his trousers appear to be on fire. One of the agency’s top accounts is Lucky Strike, and this presents the ad men with a problem. Reader’s Digest - which, another period touch, everybody reads - has said smoking causes cancer, and the authorities won’t allow agencies to claim there are safer brands. "Four out of five dead people smoke your brand,” is not, Draper observes, the best possible caption. But Draper is brilliant, up there with the DDB VW team. He gets round the death problem by saying of the tobacco in Luckies, “It’s toasted!”. All cigarette tobacco is toasted. But so what? It’s a nice, warm, safe word.

Draper’s monstrous genius is, in fact, too big to be locked in the ad world of 1960. Flogging Luckies as toasted may be quaint. But he is also looking after the Right Guard deodorant account. In a moment of subtle drama, he is lying in bed after being told by his mistress he stinks, asking himself Freud’s old question: what do women want? He gets it in one - “Any excuse to get closer” - and a brand is born. The Right Guard slogan, with its psychological intimacy and authenticity, is way ahead of its time. Authenticity was to take over from domestic comfort and bourgeois aspiration as the central advertising theme in the later, summer-of-love 1960s.

But the twist in the tale of all this period detail is the same as the twist in our own Life on Mars: in some fundamental sense, “then”, for all its faults, seems more attractive than “now”. At one level, this is simply about the gorgeous look of the show. The styling derives its power from the hard-surfaced abstraction of the architecture and interior design of the time. A book could be written on the credit sequence alone, with its overtones of Saul Bass, Hitch-cock and Scorsese, and its use of silhouetted linearity. It’s all about alienation, of course, but it’s beautiful and as eerily romantic as the deep-buttoned booths and vodka gimlets in the restaurants.

The clothes, meanwhile, are not just good, they are downright catwalk-fashionable. Ever since the unstructured 1980s, men’s suits have been getting sharper, to the point where the average male silhouette is now more or less back where it was in 1960. Women, meanwhile, have been racing back to what The New York Times’s Ruth La Ferla calls the “meticulously tailored look that evokes the White House of Jacqueline Kennedy”. She adds: “Some of Seventh Avenue’s most influential taste-makers are invoking in their latest collections the proprieties, the seamless appearances and the toney aspirations of midcentury Middle America. They are, in short, going bourgeois to the core.” La Ferla quotes an art director, Sam Shahid: “Things are timeless right now ...” But then he adds, with deadly poignancy: “Or you want them to be.” So, like the 1970s in Life on Mars, 1960 in Mad Men is being seen as both horrifying and seductive. Draper’s wife is going mad in suburbia, but she looks great while she’s doing it, and so, come to that, does suburbia.

It would, however, be a big mistake to see Mad Men as a prolonged wallow in moral dismay and fashionista nostalgia. I know exactly why Weiner insisted this wasn’t a period piece. Primarily, like Chase in The Sopranos, he wants us to be objective. This involves denying us any easy moralising about the characters. Tony Soprano, like Don Draper, does what he does, and, if we keep stepping back and judging, we won’t understand.

In fact, this antimoralistic, high-objectivity stance is now all over the best American television. Both the great current cop shows, The Wire and The Shield, work, not because of simple amorality, but because of a deep awareness that no consistent moral posture can ever work. By setting his Mad Men amid the alien mores of 1960, Weiner distances them, making us watch them as if they were goldfish in a bowl of plate glass and stainless steel. We see them in a little world, they see themselves as the whole world; and, in doing so, we realise that we might also be goldfish. Like Brecht, Weiner understands that emotional distance - alienation - can intensify our engagement with what is really going on.

And finally, there is the whole issue of work itself. The Office, in both its American and British versions, and Joshua Ferris’s highly successful novel Then We Came to the End have indicated a strong contemporary awareness of the oddity of the working - specifically the clerical - life. What was banal has suddenly become exotic. Mad Men goes back to the time when the modern office, with its cubicles, geometric furniture and translucent glass, was born. It revels in the drama this creates. A refused handshake becomes, in this stark, demanding environment, a terrible frozen moment. And there’s a wonderful shot down the facade of the building, the stainless-steel mullions diving down towards the suited figures scurrying into the entrance.

The office had become the great exposer of all human weakness, as well as the centre of all human power. And advertising had begun its long march to world domination. It was 48 years ago, but it seems like tomorrow.

Mad Men hits British screens on BBC4 tonight at 10pm.

Men behaving badly

Set in 1960s New York, the golden age of advertising, Mad Men portrays a world of wealth and clashing egos. Can it live up to its billing as the new Sopranos? Jonathan Bernstein thinks so...

As writer and executive producer on the last three seasons of The Sopranos, Matthew Weiner has the blood of Bobby Bacala and Christopher Moltisanti on his hands. His new series, the critically worshipped, Golden Globe-winning Mad Men, is another close study of a secret fraternity where egos clash, tempers flare and bloody vendettas are launched. Mad Men takes place in the Madison Avenue of 1960, when advertising was seen as a sexy, aspirational profession rather than one that needs to be prefaced by an apologetic explanation.

Don Draper, the series' lead character (played by the previously little-known but soon to be big-known Jon Hamm), embodies every attribute that once made advertising guys the envy of the nine-to-five world. He's suave, he's prosperous, he looks good in a suit, he has a bottomless repository of cynical quips, he glides through life in a haze of cigarette smoke, fuelled by martinis and the ministrations of a chic, discrete boho mistress who soothes away the pain of the day before he swans back to the suburbs and his perfect model-pretty wife and high-spirited, unblemished kids.

But Don Draper is an unknowable empty shell, hiding a secret past and utterly detached from his equally at-sea model-pretty wife. And, just as Don has made himself a sexy success by presenting a glossy, smoky facade, so his Manhattan-based agency Sterling Cooper, which made its millions by playing on America's insecurities about all the things they don't have and didn't know they needed, is a barely-hidden house of pain. Women are seen but rarely heard beyond the squeals of pleasure accompanying the regular, friendly slaps on the butt. The mousey girl who shows an aptitude with copy and makes the rare transition from the secretarial pool to the copywriter's desk is regarded with pity and suspicion by all the other females in the office. The only visible black faces are the cleaners who leave in the morning moments before the staff roll in. When a Jewish client comes in for a meeting, a frantic search culls the agency's lone Jew from the mailroom. Sterling Cooper's sole gay employee works overtime presenting himself as a ladies' man and comes close to unravelling when a male client makes a pass at him. The agency boss Roger Sterling (John Slattery, the only nominally recognisable cast member) can't control his raging appetites even after he's felled by a series of heart attacks. And, on the eve of the Kennedy- Nixon election, the pulse-takers of the agency are, almost to a man, convinced of a Nixon victory and confused by the prospect that times may be changing.

For all the secrets and the affairs and the personality clashes and even the physical confrontations, Mad Men unspools at an almost hallucinatory pace. Characters listen and consider what others have said. There are long leisurely moments devoted to people thinking about what has just happened to them. By TV standards - by life standards - Mad Men requires a considerable amount of attention. "Someone was joking with me," says Matthew Weiner. "They said 'you know what your show is? It's the phone's ringing and someone walks into the room but they don't answer it.' I can honestly say that the directorial style and the pace of the show is determined by how I like things. There's so much subterfuge, so much lying and dishonesty when people are together socially, that a lot of what you're seeing when it gets slow is the honesty. Some people have described it as dreamlike but there's always a story being told. I hope that when people watch it they're not doing their chequebooks and talking on the phone because they're going to miss something."

Despite the treatment meted out to anyone who isn't white, male and the right kind of rich - Sterling Cooper's ambitious, privileged twenty-something is an almost universal object of contempt - Weiner is an ardent admirer of the era whose foibles he chronicles: "1960 was just such a fruitful, interesting time in the United States. There was so much intellectual activity going on. There's amazing musical things, amazing books were coming out. Because of the prosperity of the time, people were starting to pay attention to materialism. And also, it really was the apex of New York City. It was the centre of production, publishing, fashion, playwriting, television. It was the biggest port, and then the pill came out in 1960, which was one of the greatest challenges to ever happen to humanity. And at the bottom of all that, advertising was on the verge of a revolution." But when we think of that time in America, our first impressions are the white picket fence and the happy family. "There's such a dichotomy in the culture between the way it's been presented to the world versus the way people were actually living. A lot of the cliched depictions of the 50s - and I picked 1960 as the height of the 50s' [popular US sitcom] Leave It To Beaver and the ideal family with the dad in the hat driving the car - people were laughing at these things back then. We have a perception of the way it was and it's not even close to the way it was."

While fictional advertising men and women are as plentiful now as they were in the days when Rock Hudson and Tony Randall strode the corridors of cinematic agencies, the current incarnation of the copywriter is permanently repenting for the shallowness of their career choice.

Don Draper may be a shadowy figure, unable to fully open himself up to anyone in his life, but he's at his best when he's unashamedly selling, whether it be a product, his agency or his version of himself. "I've always thought that the reason advertising has this appeal is that there's great stock given in jobs that are creative but also make money," says Weiner. "I find that salesmanship is an American religion. It's not about conscience. His conscience should be focused on his life. Business is not about conscience - business is about selling products, which is what he's best at. If you set it now, he would have to be apologising, he would have to be feeling sick about what he does."

As the man behind the suffocation of Christopher Moltisanti and the execution of Bacala in a model train shop, Weiner does not discount the role played by The Sopranos in the ultimate evolution of his subsequent show. "The Mad Men pilot script was how I got my job on The Sopranos. When I got there the show was already a billion dollar success. David (Chase)'s attitude was basically 'serve the story, make sure you're saying something, make everything a little movie'. You start to really think about the audience and surprising them and not giving them what they're expecting. I was there for three seasons, I'd already seen it as a fan for four. It made me raise my game, it made me pay more attention and it made me trust myself."

Mad Men, Sun, 10pm, BBC4

Mad Men- fine advertisement for American TV drama

A series set in a New York ad agency is a brilliant evocation of 1960s America suggests Benji Wilson.

It does Mad Men - a new US drama set in the world of advertising on Madison Avenue in the early 1960s - a disservice to begin by talking about the amount of smoking it contains. But given that these days cigarettes are considered almost as pestiferous as the pox, it's impossible to ignore: every single character, without exception, is continually chugging away. The fictional advertising agency Stirling Cooper is a hazy, tar-stained place, and if the world Mad Men creates wasn't so completely convincing, it might look as if the writers were trying to make a point. But, instead, it reminds us that in New York in 1960 this is just what people did.

The same goes for the drinking, the misogyny, the anti-Semitism and the racial gibes. They are all so completely of-a-piece with the surrounding milieu that, after an episode or two, they become part of the socio-cultural furniture. It makes for some uneasy viewing, in a weird place between abhorrence and nostalgia.

Playing ping-pong with our memories of things past in this way is a trick that's become fashionable on television recently, most notably in the BBC's Life on Mars and its follow-up Ashes to Ashes. But where those two series play it for laughs, and sugar the pill with plenty of wham-bam action scenes, Mad Men is a much more subtle piece. It centres around Don Draper (Jon Hamm), the creative director at Stirling Cooper. A war hero with a 1950s movie-star mien, Draper has one foot firmly in the past, but as a brilliant ad man and a survivor, he also has one eye on adapting for the future.

The team that he assembles around him, from his fledgeling secretary Peggy (Elizabeth Moss, aka President Bartlet's daughter Zoey in The West Wing) to the unctuous tyro Pete Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser) all have their own secrets and fears. In the first few episodes very little happens. Instead, Mad Men takes exquisite care to ground the viewer in the sights, aesthetic and mores of a particular moment in time. When it launched in America last year, Mad Men was the single stand-out critical hit, hailed as being an entirely original immersion in America's not-so-distant past. It won Best Drama at this year's Golden Globes, with Hamm taking the Best Actor award.

"I placed it very specifically," says the show's creator, Matthew Weiner, who worked as a producer and writer on The Sopranos. He cites the idiom of Salinger and John Cheever as well as movies such as The Apartment and Cash McCall as influences. Of course, 1960 was the year that John F. Kennedy was elected. But Weiner is trying to show how America remained as divided as ever. "There's always a counter-culture in the United States. The election of John F.Kennedy has been historically metabolised as this assertion of youth and hope - the truth is that election was decided by a very small percentage of the country; half the country did not vote for him."

Also, 1960 was a very important year for advertising. In the third episode Don and his masters-of-the-universe discuss Doyle Dane Bernbach's famous campaign for the Volkswagen Beetle, which used headlines such as “Think Small” and “Lemon” to sell Americans a little car that couldn't have been more different from the cocksure gilded beauty of a 1960 Cadillac.

"Advertising had just begun to change," says Weiner. "The Volkswagen ad is really revolutionary. It has a subversive quality that's based on honesty, humour, and it's talking to the consumer." That went entirely against the prevailing postwar mood, where people had implicit trust in the genius of American manufacturing, and had come to believe what they were told about each great new advance. Because Mad Men uses advertising as a metaphor for identity - are you how you present yourself to other people, or is the hard-sell just there to cover up your faults as a product? - watching Draper and co struggling to come to terms with a new type of advertising goes hand in hand with watching them face up to the climactic change that the 1960s was to bring.

"Dramatically speaking I liken it to the Titanic," says Weiner. "Why do people watch that movie? Everybody knows how it ends. But there is some pleasure in seeing people struggling to survive when the catastrophe happens, and there's also some intrinsic drama in people walking around talking about how safe the ship is. That's really what I'm doing."

With the current American presidential election candidates talking of 'change' to the point where it's become a blah-blah bromide, Mad Men has very cleverly stationed itself at another cultural crossroads. Everyone is teetering on the brink; they just don't quite know it yet.

Mad Men, Sunday, BBC Four, 10pm; Tues, BBC Two, 11.20pm