Ivo Graham's Mad Men Mixtape

For all the anxiety induced on approach and the throat lozenges that will have to be nursed to keep the various shows on the road, I’m living multiple dreams this Fringe: getting to play the Grand with my conveniently-titled stand-up show Grand Designs, hosting my own floor-filling popularity contest in Comedians’ DJ Battles, and then even carving out a daily space for existential angst in my storytelling theatre show Carousel. The latter show’s title and blurb give a pretty heavy-handed shout-out to my favourite TV show (/vehicle for thinking pretentiously about my own life), Mad Men, and specifically a scene at the end of the first series which lays bare the dangerous power of nostalgia, the black hole that can open up when we spend more time polishing the past than focusing on the future. Unfortunately, I’ve chosen to live and work in that black hole, and though I remain resolved to redress that balance some time after the Fringe, I’m in too deep to opt out at least any time in the next few weeks.

The indulgence I’ve enjoyed most in compiling Carousel, alongside the delusion that hoarding boxes and boxes of literal and emotional baggage in my head and home for years was somehow not denial or paralysis but actually a long-term artistic strategy, has been getting to use music in the show, an emotional short-cut that has always thrilled me in other people’s work but never made greater inroads into my stand-up than a song to walk on to at the start and off to at the end.

Picking the music for Carousel and timing my navel-gazing monologues over the top has been the closest to a capital-d Dramatist I’ve ever felt, and so when asked to make a playlist related to the show (its actual soundtrack is also available for anyone who cares to ask), all roads led back to Mad Men, a show that nails its big moments with exquisite song choices, almost all of them consistent with the period (1960-1970), some of them famously obtained at great expense. I’ve limited myself to five, with honourable mentions to the Beatles, the Beach Boys, Jimi Hendrix, Jessica Paré’s iconic Zou Bisou Bisou, and Robert Morse’s transcendent 'The Best Things In Life Are Free'. (All of my shows are, regrettably, ticketed).

Bob Dylan – Don't Think Twice, It’s All Right (Series 1, Episode 13)

I'm a part-time player when it comes to Dylan, but this is one of my favourite songs of all time, and that's largely because of this moment: the season one finale, the ultimate "expectations/reality" switcheroo, another punch to the gut straight after the Carousel scene. We've watched Don Draper sell his domestic bliss to Kodak, and, of course (strokes chin pensively) to himself: now he goes home for Thanksgiving and we see what that idyll actually looks like. I've opened a few of these doors over the years and this scene hits harder every time.

Simon & Garfunkel – Bleecker Street (Series 4, Episode 7)

The show’s halfway point and a frequent flyer in “best episode” lists (of Mad Men and indeed all TV ever): you simply must seek it out, with or without the three-and-a-half series leading up to it, if only to add a bit more context to the “that’s what the money is for!” clip which you’ve surely stumbled across elsewhere. As a long-time student of the deluded art of the all-nighter, I can only dream of a Wednesday morning 3am as delicate and potent as this: Don and Peggy skipping the big fight to laugh and cry and drink and doze into the new day, where she leaves his office, door open, to the crooked rhymes of New York’s finest. “I saw a shadow touch a shadow’s hand.” OOF!

The Fly Bi Nites – Found Love (Series 6, Episode 10) 

One of the show’s many great drug odysseys now (and it really is criminal that Roger’s LSD trip isn’t in this list): Don takes a toke of a fat one at a party in California, and suddenly he's on another carousel, floating through a bespoke dreamscape of guilt and paranoia, but all with a west coast 60s glamour that simply can't be reached by the CBD gummies I bought last year from a wellness emporium in St Albans. When Megan takes him by the hand, and the organ on ‘Found Love’ fades, and swells, with the crackles of laughter and lighters piercing the haze, that delicious, horrible tipping point in a night out where all your best and worst decisions start to swirl around you: it's my favourite musical moment of the entire series, even if it is, as ever, bleak AF. Wake up, man! You've fallen in the pool!

Tennessee Ernie Ford – Sixteen Tons (Series 3, Episode 7)

I’ve barely done an honest day’s work in my life and it doesn’t get much less “muscle and blood” than writing listicles about your favourite TV show for Fest, but unfortunately I’m more than able to project my own commitment issues, and Hilton-related PTSD, onto Don doing everything he can not to sign Connie’s contract. (Admittedly I’ve never taken barbiturates from a hitch-hiker, but there’s still time). Shout-out, here, to Rhys James, who built this finger-clicking goodness into his 2015 Edinburgh show, to Wes Anderson, who put it in Asteroid City last year, and to my daughter, who’s mostly still into the Frozen and Matilda soundtracks but genuinely loves singing “I owe my soul to the company store” with surreal gusto for a five-year-old not currently in gainful employment.

Judy Collins – Both Sides Now (Series 6, Episode 13)

And to wrap things up on that same queasily sentimental note, with my little girl, shouted-out pretty heavily in my Fringe shows in a sweet but hollow substitute for actually spending more of the summer holiday with her. Parenthood is, let me be surely the first to say, an emotional roller-coaster, its various performances of maturity and certainty crumbling as the most important person in your life starts to laser through them. Sally Draper gets more of a crash course than most, and of course a quick road trip to Don’s own childhood “home” isn’t going to wash any of that away, but as she looks at her dad outside the house, and another sledgehammer series comes to an even tentatively redemptive end with ‘Both Sides Now’ (breezier than Joni’s version, itself of course the soundtrack to another bad-dad shocker in Love Actually), you’d be hard pushed not to think about your own kids, or your own parents, and the various innocences lost along the way. Or maybe not! Maybe you just get on with shit! I really don’t know life at all!