Interesting, the way one programme can be so insightful about some things and clueless about others. Mad Men last night featured two strands, one that left me frustrated at its clumsiness, the other in awe at its insight.

The clunky scene was all about Don Draper encountering his lover’s beatnik friends when he tries to whisk her off to Paris for a week. They reminded me of the hepcat stereotypes found in John Waters’ Hairspray. In that film they were at least intended to have comedy value, which I guess was part of the purpose in Mad Men, but they didn’t register with the same roundedness as Don and the other ad agency characters. I cringed when one of them said, putting on Miles Davis’s Sketches of Spain, “Lets get high and listen to Miles”, but in retrospect maybe that was because it reminded me of a period of my life when I’d do much the same. Please let me not have actually said those words…

Anyway, the beatnik material just didn’t convince me. The clash between daddi-o Don Draper the ad agency square and the hipsters was just too heightened to be credible. Maybe if they’d done it over a longer period of time it would have worked: his counterculture lover is certainly real enough. But the addition of her friends moved the show into using broad brush strokes that didn’t convince this ex-adman and former pot smoking Miles listener.

That was all made up for in a beautifully portrayed sequence with Salvatore, the gay art director. I’ve not caught all of the episodes to know exactly what’s been happening with him, but we know that he’s gay and – clearly in 1960 America – closeted. What I didn’t know was whether he had any kind of love life. To which the answer is, sadly, no.

Salvatore ends up meeting a guy in an after work drinking venue, and they go for a meal together. Nothing unusual about that, and that’s exactly the point: the way for two men to get together in a culture that frowns on homosexuality is to normalise what they’re doing. So while the surface is all about two regular guys chewing the fat, the power of the writing and performance was in the undercurrents.

The longer they were together, the more clear the attraction became, though the talk was still fantastically elliptical. And Salvatore was comfortable with things being that way – in the world of possibility, of fantasies as sure as the ones he helps craft at the ad agency – until his dining partner makes the briefest physical contact with him, touching his hand and drinking from his glass. He makes it clear – or at least clear enough to the viewer, there’s still no direct mention of what’s on offer here – that Salvatore and he could be an item. And Salvatore just can’t cope with it: confronted by the reality of the situation he longs for, he crumples.

For me, the effect was heartbreaking. But maybe for an older gay viewer, the scene was just as clichéd as the beatnik stuff was for me. I think not though: there was a level of emotional conviction about this scene that worked beautifully (if tragically) quite possibly because that same interaction is still being played out somewhere in the world countless times every day nearly fifty years later, despite homosexuality being something that’s a lot more open now.