TV REVIEW:
'LOVE WAS invented by guys like
me to make you buy nylons." For three days after JFK's
assassination in Dallas, Texas, in 1963, there were, apparently, no
commercials shown on American TV, writes
Hilary Fannin.
Mad MenBBC4, Sunday and BBC2, Tuesday
Rock RivalsUTV and TV3, Wednesday
Stephen Hawking: Master of the UniverseChannel 4, Monday
What Am I Worth?RTÉ1, Tuesday
For three days the powerful advertising agencies on Madison Avenue loosened their grip on the US imagination and allowed a nation to mourn.
Matthew Weiner, executive producer and writer of The Sopranos, has applied his prodigious talent to the broiling world of New York City in the 1950s and early 1960s, focusing his lens on the kings of Madison Avenue, the Brylcreemed admen in box suits who tattooed a tobacco-stained, Martini-drinking, high-heel-clacking, nylon-straightening America on to our collective psyche.
Mad Men, which kicked off on BBC4 (but could also be found later in the week on BBC2), is damned satisfying, and as toxic and addictive as the nicotine sticks that smoulder throughout the drama. Everybody smokes, everywhere - in one dispiriting scene, even a slap-happy gynaecologist had a fag in his mouth.
Episode one saw innovative ad agency Sterling Cooper's creative director, Don Draper (Jon Hamm) - a wonderfully depressed, fatalistic ex-soldier with a talent for deciphering the tom-toms that beat out the American dream - attempt to come up with a campaign to sell cigarettes to a continent that was waking up to the dangers of its cravings.
"Four outa five dead people smoke your brand," smirked one of the agency's creatives, pulling in a lungful of his Lucky Strike before offering advice to his male colleagues on how to treat a lady: "Let them know what kind of guy you are, then they'll know what kind of girl to be."
In the smoggy, stylised world of Mad Men, where "emancipated" young women wash down their oral contraceptives with a couple of Librium, and where a kind of droit de seigneur seems to prevail over the typing pool, the sexism (as well as the tobacco consumption) is staggering. "Go home and put your curlers in, and we'll make a fresh start tomorrow," Draper advised his virginal yet willing young secretary, who seemed to assume she came free with the coffee.
Our Madison Avenue was Grafton Street, when it still had buses on it and frisky creatives dashed down ruthless agency stairways to crowd into the Red Bank restaurant or prop up the bar in the Bailey, their boxes of Sweet Afton in one pocket and their paypackets in the other, while their lady wives mouldered away in the 'burbs with their daughters (that's enough with the autobiography). And, despite the homophobia, the racism, the blatant sexism of Mad Men, the series does, in some ways, seem a nostalgic portrait, as much about the seismic shifts in women's lives and attitudes in the last 50 years as it is about advertising.
Whatever, it is a crisply brilliant tale framed by social history, a fascinating examination of duplicitous machinations played out just a whisper ago.
IF MAD MEN has the sophistication and bite of a silky vermouth unravelling itself over steamy ice, then Rock Rivals, the new drama wot started on UTV and TV3 this week, is a cherry-flavoured alcopop and a pack of bacon fries. Rock Rivals is brilliant, a reality show within a soap opera, a drama that requires of its viewer the intellectual rigour of a baby wipe. If you haven't turned down social engagements because you didn't want to miss the X-Factor final, I can guarantee you that this heavily made-up dross will mean nothing to you. If, however, you are a secret fan of the wailing, weeping and ego-gnashing that are the hallmarks of needle-in-haystack talent extravaganzas, then you will surely enjoy this.
Rock Rivals is set behind the scenes of The X-Factor (although no one actually says that out loud), a Botox-fuelled pantomime in which tight-lipped Michelle Collins (an actress who has turned a snarl into a career) plays Karina (more or less Sharon Osbourne) and Sean Gallagher plays Mal Faith (more or less Simon Cowell). For plot purposes, the couple are married; that is, until he shags his PA (a woman disquietingly named Jinx, which should have been a bit of a giveaway) in the dressing-room while still wearing his microphone, and their somewhat theatrical coupling is overheard in the green room. This unleashes a torrent of hellfire and fury as Karina drives Mal's Ferrari into a swimming pool and cuts up her husband's overpriced suits.
True revenge, however, can only be exacted by Karina eclipsing her husband's pretty-boy protege, and dead cert to win the contest, Luke (Sol Heras) by getting belter Bethany (Holly Quin-Ankrah), her talented but deeply loopy contender, to desist from slashing her wrists and swigging on her nail varnish remover.
The drama, being a clever old tart, will include a full-blown song contest and phone poll, and, with two alternative endings having been filmed, viewers can vote during the penultimate show on who they want to win the final. I can barely contain myself. It is filmed in Ireland and with Gary Cooke playing the third judge (now I wonder who that could be), so one can always play spot-the-location when the script gets really ropy. Oh go on, you know you want to.
ABOUT HALFWAY THROUGH Stephen Hawking: Master of the Universe I got a message on my mobile from a friend in an antipodean labour ward who was waiting to produce identical twins. While Hawking's single facial muscle (the only muscle he now controls independently) activated the sensor on his cheek via a "blink switch" to begin the laborious process of communicating 13.7 billion years of the history of the universe, from black holes chewing up the cosmos to black holes chewing up the cosmos, via sub-atomic particles, relativity and quantum mechanics, I pondered the wonder of . . . text.
How in the name of collapsing stars, singularities and astrophysics is my grubby little phone able to reproduce my friend's words from across the planet? And how truly extraordinary that by the time I begin another day she will be doing a double-take over a bamboo crib.
I tell you this to try and explain how unqualified I am to comment on the contents of this extraordinary programme. I understand nothing that bleeps. I find counting tiring. Too many numbers on one page makes me depressed. I could wallpaper the Kremlin with my unopened bank statements.
How can one planet produce Stephen Hawking's brilliance and my doleful ineptitude? How can Hawking's mind, bubbling away in his broken, doll-like frame, push and push at the gigantic yet apparently minuscule "theory of everything", a theory he can almost "see" but which continues to elude him? How has this tiny man fought off death, forecast as imminent more than 40 years ago (when he was diagnosed with motor neurone disease), in order to pursue the question "why are we here?"
Hawking displays no self-pity and appears almost to exist beyond the temporal (although he did share a couple of Marks and Sparks ready-meals with his Cambridge PhD students).
He counts himself lucky for his life, his children, his work. "I want to know the mind of God," he once said. Me, I'd settle for knowing my ATM number.
The baby girls are fine, by the way.
ANYWAY, YOU'LL BE pleased to hear that while Hawking is searching for the key to the mystery of creation, RTÉ, your friendly national broadcaster, is spending the licence fee on How Much Am I Worth? Now, if our Milky Way is a dot on the pinhead of a cardinal (or however the saying goes), then a dull little half-hour programme trailing a nice girl around the suburbs as she experiments with a career in pharmaceutical sales is a tough little pimple on the tightened backside of reality TV.
This is an excruciatingly boring idea, dully presented, which obstinately refuses to be interesting. An attempt to develop a fleetingly interesting reference to biometrics ended when career adviser Lisa Holt dragged the subject into the black hole of mediocrity with the words: "If you want something in life, you have to work hard for it." Oh please, someone point me at the plughole in the universe, I want to get out.