Matthew Weiner on creating Mad Men

The new series of Mad Men comes to BBC Four later this month, and in the Telegraph its creator, Matthew Weiner, talks to Neil Midgley

Mad Men is a labour not just of love but of passion: his office is furnished with a period buttonback sofa and chairs that could have come straight from the series and, in his assistant’s anteroom, there’s a wall covered in all sorts of print advertisements from the Sixties. But, Weiner says, he was prompted to write the pilot script by much more recent events.

“It was inspired by a friend who was going through a divorce and worked in Manhattan in finance during 9/11,” he says. “Two or three days afterwards I said: ‘How’s it going? What’s New York like?’ He said: ‘What can I tell you? I’m still getting divorced.’ The most stimulating thing, intellectually and creatively, about Mad Men is that I’ve been able to write about how we experience history.”