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Best Of This Week's Tv New! Mad Men Tuesday, Bbc2, 11.20pm The Seediness Of The '60s Corporate World Is Laid Out In All Its Glory In This Classy Series

If ever there was a series to make you realise that political correctness ain't all bad, then this has to be it.

Mad Men is a glossy, witty US drama set in the high-flying world of TV ad executives in the early Sixties, where slogans are everything but words like sexist and racist have no meaning.

But neither that nor the glimpses of strippers in the burlesque joints frequented by execs and their floosies are what shock you the most when watching this first of 13 episodes - what really raises the eyebrows is the amount of fags and booze they all get through.

Jon Hamm plays clean-cut creative director Don Draper, whose reign at the prestigious Sterling Cooper Ad Agency on New York's Madison Avenue (hence the Mad Men name) is constantly under threat from the ruthless young whippersnappers who covet his job.

When young shavers such as the wonderfully loathsome Pete (Vincent Kartheiser) aren't busy stabbing Don in the back they are fully occupied with leering at naive but ambitious new girl Peggy (Elisabeth Moss) or sexually assaulting casual acquaintances.

Draper himself is seldom seen without a glass of rye whiskey in one hand and a cigarette in the other, and the first episode actually revolves around fags. News is filtering through to people that cigarettes kill you, which means Don can no longer push Lucky Strike as a 'safer' brand, and desperately needs a newidea to sell his cancer sticks.

Draper may be the office dynamo but his private life is a mess, with a beautiful but neglected wife back home, kids he adores but hardly sees, an independently-minded occasional lover and a potential new client Rachel Menken as the gorgeous, feisty head of a family owned department store.

The series, by former Sopranos writer Matt Weiner, has already proved a hit in the US, where it carried off the Golden Globe for Best Drama in January.

Weiner says: "I've watched a lot of TV in my life and I'm really trying not to do things that lie about human behaviour."

So the dialogue crackles with wit and authenticity and reveals a world that often disgusts and repels yet also exudes a certain kind of glamour.