I picked a good week to give up smoking. Everyone in BBC Four’s brand-new, Golden Globe-winning drama Mad Men is chuffing away. After some marvellous opening credits, we met Don Draper – the chiselled, sharp-suited Creative Director of a major advertising company. Don is sitting in a bar and, as he looks around him, all the attractive people are smoking. This doesn’t help Don so much, because he’s got an important meeting with Lucky Strike tomorrow and he’s in a lather – Readers’ Digest magazine has published an article stating that smoking is a health risk and he has to come up with some new selling angles quick. He starts talking to a black waiter (a white waiter comes over and asks him if everything’s ok, because this particular black waiter is a bit ‘chatty’), who says that he just loves smoking and he’s smoked the same brand for years. This doesn’t help Don at all, so he drives over to his girlfriend’s house – a fashion designer – for some inspiration. After a night of lovemaking, he still hasn’t come up with any new angles. But Don is his company’s hotshot, and his girlfriend is confident he can come up with something. He always does. Don is untouchable.

This was the first 15 minutes of Mad Men, and I was hooked. In this first section, it crystallised what the show was all about so nicely and incisively – always thinking about what makes people tick, and they way the 1960s was a changing and volatile decade where black and feminist issues were bubbling under the surface of all this smiley-happy narcissism and hinting that it was about to come to the fore.

Sterling Cooper is New York’s premier advertising agency. It’s full of sharp, cocky people smoking. There are the guys; walking on air, shagging anything that moves and coming up with spins.

Then there are the women. The relationship between men and women in 1960′s office life was neatly summed up when Peggy, a new receptionist, was shown the ropes by seasoned (and rather saucy) Joan. Joan tells her to show her a bit of leg, play on her womanly wiles and give the men what they want and need. She says this with a wink. Peggy is soon sent to a doctor by Joan, to pick up a prescription for the pill. Peggy is keen to impress on her first day so, even though she’s a virgin, she goes along with it and starts to prepare herself for the world she has just entered.

This world is full of me in positions of power. Four oily and obnoxious apprentices hover around King Don (now with a clean-pressed shirt on, plucked from his desk draw full of clean-pressed shirts, after his stop-out night) because they want to be him. They try too hard and one young horrible, Peter, is so keen he has to be taken down a peg or two from Don (after Peter has tried to assert his manliness by cracking onto Peggy in a horrible, all-powerful way).

After we meet the office characters, we see Don in action. He meets Rachel Menken, head of her father’s department store business. She’s uncompromising and Don doesn’t take to a woman telling him what to do. The meeting doesn’t go well.

The next meeting is with Lucky Strike boys looks as though it isn’t going to go well too, until Don (still struggling with a new angle) comes up trumps with an inspired improvisation. He tells the Lucky Strike fellas that advertising is about selling happiness, and that because themselves and their competitors are on a level playing field (they’re all selling tobacco, tobacco is bad, they can’t mention the health issues), they can sell their product anyway they want. “It’s toasted” is the logo he goes for, in reference to the way the tobacco is prepared.

We also see Peter on his stag do, being obnoxious and him and his buddies playing on the fact that they’re hotshot ad men, Peter visiting Peggy at the end of the night, Don taking Rachel Menken out for dinner to apologise for his outburst earlier (they have a frank discussion about love ad marriage, Don surmising that love doesn’t exist, it’s a concept people like him invented to sell pantyhoses), and then Don going back to his home… to his own wife and kids.

Wow. What a start! So much going on, the character were interesting and watchable and the dialogue was smart and sharp. I know that much has been made of the fact that creator Matthew Weiner was involved in The Sopranos, but there are some similarities – Don Draper is a great, complex anti-hero (he’s likeable, but he’s all about money and selling things… he thinks he’s untouchable, and Lord know who or what he leaves in his wake), and there’s a gang of guys at the centre. I also liked the way that, although a symptom of the time, womens’ roles were challenged thanks to certain characters and situations.

At the end of it all though, there’s really good, character-based drama here. It’s the kind of big, epic stuff that American TV does, on occasion, so, so well. I better get myself strapped in… Mad Men could get addictive.