This stylish show should bite the hand that feeds it

It's happened with a string of US-made drama series that shame our home-grown television, including The Wire and The Sopranos. So it's proved with Mad Men, an Emmy-award-winning show, made for cable — or at least, up until the halfway mark of each season.

Let me explain: the premise of Mad Men, now in its second-season run on the BBC, is a fascinating one: a fly-on-the-wall view inside the offices of the fictional Sterling Cooper advertising agency on New York's Madison Avenue.

Set during the early Sixties, the self-titled "Mad Men" are riding — and they hope steering — the breaking wave of consumerism.

Whether it's the manoeuvres Lucky Strike cigarettes makes to avoid the growing awareness of its products' health risks, or the introduction of the Volkswagen Beetle to the American market, the Mad Men's campaigns prefigure the issues of corporate responsibility and globalisation that have come to dominate our era.

And the show does so with impeccable style. Possibly it's because for those of us who are fortysomething, the early Sixties are a sort of ghostly film set anyway, but there seems something peculiarly affecting about the details of this vanished world: the heavy smoking and drinking, the hefty typewriters and the photocopier the size of a bungalow.

It may also be that never before — not even during the Sixties themselves — has it been possible to depict this decade as accurately. After all, we still have all the props, and we have a far better reprographic technology.

For me, Mad Men excels when it sticks to the dark interplay between the emotional lives of its — admittedly very fine — cast, and the sparkling array of the products they use and sell. Where the show falls down badly is in its reach for the heavy-handed plot line to propel the action forward. In this case, it's the handsome lead actor with the dark wartime past that transmogrifies this sophisticated show into a hokey old mini-series — it happened halfway through the last season and I fear it's about to happen to this one.

I wonder why Mad Men can't have the courage to stick with its social-realist premise? The answer is in what the BBC leaves out when it screens the show: the ad breaks. After all, just as the fictional television department at Sterling Cooper struggles to get its clients' products placed, like jewels, in the best possible television setting, so no contemporary advertiser wants to buy airtime in a show that undermines the very effectiveness of advertising itself. If only the very talented Matthew Weiner — who writes and produces Mad Men — had gone to HBO, then we wouldn't just have a good show, we'd have a work of utter genius.

When Pepys knew Madonna

I've been suffering from insomnia recently. Still, the small hours are always a good time to meditate on the large changes that have been wrought in the fabric of our city — I usually look to Mr Pepys for assistance, reading his entry for the corresponding day of any given year.

Monday night, 345 years ago, with the economy on the rocks and London bracing itself for a Dutch invasion, Pepys set down the affair of his brother Tom who had "(got) his servant, an ugly jade, Margeret, with child". It transpired that Tom was then blackmailed, and so "(his) first plot was to go on the other side the water and give a beggar-woman something to take the child".

The more I thought about it, the more the timelessness of Tom Pepys' tale impinged on me. "On the other side the water" is still how many regard sarf' London, while as for giving a beggar-woman "something to take the child", it's true, in this day and age, we have Madonna — who would doubtless have given Tom Pepys a very big something, before carting the bastard off — but one way or another cash-for-kids remains a constant.