ABC The Drum - Nostalgie de la booze

via abc.net.au

The casual sexism of my workplaces in the 70s - only a decade on from the world portrayed in Mad Men - was invisible to us at the time. If asked, we'd have all said at the BBC that it was an equal-opportunity environment. Yet I remember with shame a group of a dozen or so men, some young, some not, reporters and producers of the country's leading current affairs program, standing around a swimming pool at a Panorama summer party, while the lone female producer on the team swam around in the water. Someone had pulled her bikini top off, and was dangling it over her head.

Of course, as Mad Men also showed, we all smoked like chimneys and we all drank like fish. Looking back on it, how we did our jobs at all through the alcoholic haze is hard to comprehend. After all, there were no word-processors, no fax machines and no mobile phones; when I started, there were no photocopiers. The internet wasn't even a dream. TV graphics were laboriously built up with layers of black cardboard.

So in theory, finding stuff out, and writing scripts, and getting programs to air should have been far more time consuming and labour-intensive than it is today. Yet somehow we all found time to drink.

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