Once upon a time in the West
In a hangar on the New York set of television show Pan Am, a 1960s airline drama that some critics have dubbed a 'Mile High Mad Men', there is a replica of a 1960s-era Boeing 707. The cabin has been carefully kitted out to resemble the luxurious interior of a Pan American World Airways plane in the heyday of the 'jet age'. There are huge seats, even in economy class, with legroom so generous that the words 'deep vein thrombosis' must not have even entered the 60s traveller's cognitive airspace. In first class, there's a full bar and a row of leather banquettes. Everything from the wall panels to the windows to the toilets has been salvaged from airline scrap yards and refurbished.
The plane, at 35 metres long and 5.5 metres wide, cost at least US$100,000 and it is beautiful. It is the centrepiece for Pan Am, which in its first season was watched by nearly four million weekly viewers in the United States and arrived on Hong Kong television last weekend, and it recalls a time when the prospering American imagination reached to the skies and beyond. Pan Am the airline was at its peak, trailblazing the use of jet aircraft and jumbo jets in commercial travel, and serving as the de facto flag carrier for the US. Its powder blue-uniformed stewardesses - shapely and smart - were cultural icons for the era; its blue logo a symbol of a suddenly explorable world connected by an American thread.
From the outside of the fantasy fuselage, however, the full scale of the artifice is revealed. The plane's nose has been lopped off so cameras can poke into the cockpit and film the 'pilots' while they pretend to monitor altimeters that don't budge. The aluminium shell has been stripped away, revealing wooden supports that prop the plane up off the ground. There are no wings. From this perspective, it is clear that the set is just a patched-up broken dream.
Pan Am - which follows the globe-trotting lifestyles, dramatic personal predicaments and romantic entanglements of the airline's stewardesses and pilots - is the latest in a string of TV shows that call to mind headier times in the Western world's economic history. There is, of course, Mad Men (which next month starts its fifth season in the US), the progenitor of the trend, simultaneously fetishising and undermining the 60s golden years with its natty fashion, opulent parties and licentious morality. The Playboy Club, a short-lived show about Playboy bunnies, attempted to leverage off Mad Men's success but received poor ratings. And from Britain, BBC drama series The Hour sets an espionage mystery against the dawning of the age of television, with a crew of young and determined journalists embodying the optimism of a new era of aspirational possibility.
In these shows, America - along with friendly ally Britain - is the unquestioned superpower, brimming with confidence, striding with self-assured swagger into a bright future predicated on visions of endless economic expansion. And who was going to stop them? China, mired in the Great Leap Forward and then the Cultural Revolution, was not even a remote threat. Much of Europe was still recovering from the devastation of the second world war. The cold war was a looming presence but the Soviet Union could do nothing to stem the flow of riches into the mighty US.
A burgeoning American middle class emerged, helped by the G.I. Bill, which provided university education for returning veterans, and the maturation of US$200 million in war bonds. Rapid urbanisation saw low-income farm workers move into better-paying jobs in the cities and the populace enjoyed the benefits of former president Dwight Eisenhower's activist approach to the 1958 recession: public works programmes, easy credit and reduced taxes. In 1963, the year in which Pan Am is set, the US unemployment rate was just 5.5 per cent.
Indeed, the times depicted in Pan Am, Mad Men and The Hour stand in stark contrast to the times in which those shows are being produced. The US unemployment rate today is 8.5 per cent, and this year the federal budget deficit will exceed US$1 trillion for the fourth successive year. Britain, even worse off, has instigated public spending cuts larger than any other developed country has attempted in 40 years. No longer does the US enjoy a comfortable margin as the global economic superpower. China is rising - predicted by some analysts to become the world's No1 economy by 2020 - and is America's biggest creditor.