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.
It was a time of tight-knit programming and unfractured audiences. Not only were we all having to watch the same programmes, we had to sit through the same ad breaks as well. Though, as Rosie Arnold, who worked her way up the ranks of the Bartle Bogle Hegarty agency from 1984 to 2016, notes, it was often the case that the breaks were the bits you looked forward to most because the advertisements were so good. Clips of the R White’s Lemonade man, Lorraine Chase for Campari, Leonard Rossiter and Joan Collins for Cinzano remind you of the truth of this.
So too do the Shake n’ Vac woman (beside herself with happiness to bring freshness back to her carpets) and the sunlit mothers extolling mild, green Fairy Liquid’s ability to keep hands that do dishes as soft as your face, though they also remind you of the unquestioned sexism of the time. Women had arrived in the lower echelons of the business, but, as Alex Taylor, who joined Saatchi & Saatchi when its two biggest clients were Thatcher’s government and Silk Cut cigarettes, remembers, it was still the case that men – “especially creatives” – would get into physical fights with each other at work. They’re so emotional. When Taylor got her druthers, she made the Castlemaine XXXX “Must have overdone it with the sherry” ad, lampooning men instead of lamping them, which seems a much better fulfilment of the brief. Nearly 40 years on, I remember watching it for the first time with my dad and both of us laughing.
“The arrogance of men of little count astounded me,” says 80-year-old Barbara Nokes, whose career arc was basically that of Peggy in Mad Men – from secretary to copywriter when her talent became undeniable even to the dinosaurs in charge. “The words ‘fuck’ and ‘off’ were often applied.” She became the creator of possibly the most famous ad of the entire decade – Nick Kamen stripping down to his boxers to wash his Levi’s in a launderette, to a Marvin Gaye soundtrack and the quiet but obvious appreciation of the young ladies waiting for their smalls to spin dry. The male gaze suddenly switched to female, and a tradition so long unchallenged it had come to seem the immutable order of things lay in a thousand tiny pieces on the launderette floor. Now the Diet Coke ad was possible, for which many thanks.
Perhaps it’s a function of age and experience, but the women recalling the trials and triumphs of decades ago seem to have had a lot more fun than those we meet as we move into more recent times. As we reach the Dove campaign, using “real women” instead of models, and the BloodNormal advert for menstrual products that was the first to depict periods remotely accurately (red liquid rather than blue), the screen fills with painfully earnest talk about the power of advertising to change the world. Hmm. Yes. And no. The point of advertising is to shift products. If the best way to do that is to transgress social norms to stand out, advertisers do that. The best way to transgress social norms without putting people off buying your product is usually to do it in a progressive way, so in that limited sense the industry can be a force for good. But if the best way to sell something might be to associate it with a neo-Nazi group, you can bet they’d do that too.
This programme isn’t designed to be a deep interrogation of the capitalist machine. It is a celebration – and one I don’t think I’ve seen before – of women making inroads into an industry that, despite its vaunted modernity, excluded them from its inception. And those who were there have great stories to tell and great memories to evoke. It’s well-made, it’s fun, it’s a fine advertisement for their talents. It’s not going to change the world. And that’s fine.
• Mad Women is available on Channel 4.
