The 1960s admen in Mad Men (BBC Four, Sunday) are madmen. So mad, according to a caption in this delicious American import, that in the late 1950s, in order to advertise their dominance on Madison Avenue, they named themselves thus. But truly they were mad: mad to regard their female colleagues as sex slaves, mad to impose a Jewish-Gentile apartheid in their industry, mad to think they could drink before, during and after meetings and it not affect their work, and mad to chain smoke. Most of all, they were mad to think such madness could last.

Matthew Weiner's comedy-drama is set in the headquarters of the Sterling Cooper Advertising Agency, as swanky a piece of office architecture as the world had yet devised, yet as hermetic and claustrophobic as the Consolidated Life building in Billy Wilder's film The Apartment. But whereas The Apartment, having actually been made in 1960, contains no drop of historical irony, Weiner deliberately chooses 1960 for his drama, and each scene brims with it.

His characters stand in the gateway of the decade in which everything changed and the besuited white guys began their long fall from grace. Indeed, the opening titles, a homage to Hitchcock's Vertigo, show a cut-out man slowly falling from a skyscraper. But the presiding metaphor is the cigarette, fresh from its starring role in Good Night, and Good Luck. The cancer stick faces a crisis and this means so does our hero, the creative executive Don Draper, who is given the task of devising a new ad campaign for Lucky Strike. The old line that it is good for you will no longer fly. Reader's Digest has told its readers the opposite. Lucky Strike belongs to an endangered species. So, we understand, does Draper.

Jon Hamm - quite perfectly cast, not least for his of-the-era good looks - makes us see that Draper is a man aware he is walking on treacherous ground but nevertheless confident he has enough swagger to wade through to the other side. A colleague bowing to market research and psychobabble, suggests harnessing Lucky Strikes to Man's universal death wish. It is an idea that goes down incredibly badly with the brand's owners. Don instead triumphs with a slogan of utter meaninglessness: “Lucky Strike: It's Toasted.”

The madness is observed by women, most of them complicit in it. A secretary does well at Sterling and Cooper not by becoming a creative executive but by marrying one. The most sassy among this class is Joan, an office manager whose clothes fit so tightly that she resembles an egg timer on legs. She believes that through her sexuality she controls everyone - but then so do the girls in the telephone room, a coven that fancies it has the power to connect and terminally disconnect everyone. Little do they guess that a new breed of woman has infiltrated the building. Peggy looks mousy, but uses her lunch break to get prescribed the contraceptive pill. She is Don's secretary and I fear he underestimates her.

The next 13 episodes are going to be rough for him as they will be pleasurable for us. Mad Men combines the glamour of its decade with queasy intimations of the nervous breakdown that would befall it. It is Schadenfreude in a snazzy suit. Last night Draper (great name - for a clothes horse) dozily looked up from his office sofa and witnesses a fly buzz tormentedly behind a brutalist light panel. Both are prisoners of their time.

After nearly three years, Love Soup returned to BBC One on Saturday for a new series. I enjoyed it, as I always do, yet its heroine, Alice, played by the expressive yet disciplined actress Tamsin Greig, might as well be in the Sterling and Cooper typing pool for all the progress her sex has made since 1960 according to this man-penned sitcom.

Defined by her disastrous love life, Alice at least managed to pass her driving test on Saturday, if only after a terrifying tutorial when her driving instructor's car was hijacked by gangster. Alice is all kinds of intelligent - emotional, intellectual, literary - yet struggles to stay abob in her shallow pond of half-wits. There is a good case to make that she and her colleagues on the perfume counter are less liberated than Joan and Peggy were. Like David Renwick's previous sitcom creation, Victor Meldrew, Alice is meant to represent a bunch of prevailing attitudes. In fact, like him, she is entirely implausible. Happily, this fundamental error makes her no less funny.

Out of the Box

Like the best ad campaigns, Mad Men incorporates slithers of fact into its fictions. Not only is there, of course, a cigarette brand named Lucky Strike, but it actually used the slogan “It's Toasted”. Its inventor will not be complaining, however, that he goes uncredited. The slogan - meaning the tobacco leaves were not sun dried - was dreamt up not in 1960 but in 1917.

A long-awaited Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant project looks as if it might be on the way, although as a BBC film rather than a TV series. The Men at the Pru is about a group of twentysomethings in the early 1970s working for a building society facing the reality of growing up Gervais says: “We went down to the Prudential headquarters and got all this old footage so we're really getting into it.” If we are lucky, it could be a cross between The Office and Mad Men.

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