Everyone's talking about '60s US Madison Avenue ad industry series Madmen and other related advertising programmes on TV at the moment - at least, everyone in our industry is.
We in media and ad-land tend to pay an inordinate amount of attention to TV programmes that feature our world as the basis for their subject matter.
Hence the fascination with Madmen and the programming BBC4 has cleverly grouped around it, such as the Peter York-narrated documentary it aired last Sunday.
It was indeed all very entertaining, as York took a whistle-stop tour through the last 35 years of the advertising industry, pausing only to strike a number of slightly superfluous, but undoubtedly very "thoughtful", poses in various locations around London along the way. He spoke to luminaries of the advertising world including Peter Marsh, Frank Lowe, Tim Bell, David Puttnam, John Hegarty and Alan Parker, who almost to a man bemoaned the lack of "fun" and creativity in the industry nowadays.
All good fun in itself, and it was great to hear the ad illuminati reminiscing about the glory days of Thatcherism and mega-ads - and mega-budgets - for brands such as British Airways and Benson & Hedges. But Alan Parker probably had it about right when he said that the standard of work is just as good, if not better, today, and that the challenges of standing out in our multi-channel world are much greater than the days of one commercial TV channel and default mega-million audiences.
It was also sensible of the BBC to start Madmen off in the shallower waters of BBC4, rather than subjecting it to the harsh light of, say, the mainstream schedule of ITV1 at 9.00pm on a Friday night, which is what ITV did with Moving Wallpaper and Echo Beach. Even our ad alumni are probably too old to remember the glory days of Madison Avenue, though the heady mix of testosterone, nicotine and pretty girls still pulls in many appreciative and nostalgic viewers from the streets of Soho. But you do have to wonder whether this enthusiasm from our little corner of the world is shared by the mass of mainstream viewers out there.
