They made the Diet Coke ad! Cast real women for Dove! Got a man to strip off in a launderette! This documentary meets the female talent that redefined a toxically male industry
The past, as I often used to say to LP Hartley over a pint of Old Toejam, is a foreign country. They do things differently there. And even though I spent my formative years there, this seems never more true than when the 1980s come under scrutiny. What was happening? What were we thinking?
And so to Mad Women, Channel 4’s entertaining jog-trot through the arrival in the 70s and ascendancy through the 80s and beyond of women in the advertising industry, as the rise of consumerism and growing affluence and appetites meant that all sorts of boys’ clubs began to fissure under the pressure to supply and let in hitherto undesirables. Wrong class, wrong chromosomes – sometimes both, can you believe! – started turning up in banking, mostly, at first. Then the rot spread, and here we are now with the working classes and women simply everywhere.
