Mad Men

As anyone who has watched the riveting American TV series Mad Men will know, life in a Manhattan ad agency in the early 1960s involved an inordinate amount of drinking and smoking. In addition to its many other qualities, Mad Men shows in a particularly vivid way how much our idea of what constitutes acceptable behaviour has changed in the last 50 years. It is fascinating to be reminded, for example, that heavy smoking in a confined space was considered perfectly normal and no-one would ever have dreamt of complaining. I well remember my brother and I smoking contently away in the stalls of the stalls of the Embassy Cinema in Braintree. Did we also rise manfully for the National Anthem? I can't remember.

I don't know what inference to draw from it but it is a fact that Americans keep their cigarettes to themselves. They would never dream, as we in Europe did and do, of offering a cigarette to their neighbours at the dinner table, for example. Look at Mad Men and you will see this is true.