Cigarette, everyone?

Smoking in public places is becoming outlawed in more and more countries around the world. My first experience of this sea-change was in 2001 when I visited California. I hadn’t known about the law there, and at first I just couldn’t understand why people in a hotel bar were leaving their drinks to go outside!

England went smoke-free rather late, in 2007. It’s still a pleasant surprise to go into a cafe, pub or restaurant and not be enveloped in a fug that permeates your hair and clothes. Pushing your way through a small crowd of rather sad looking smokers to get into the premises is the small price we now have to pay for being able to enjoy clean, healthy air indoors.

Interestingly, as cigarette smoking is being marginalised like this, it becomes more and more prominent in popular TV dramas. On Coronation Street, Deirdre has a fag in the back yard when she is stressed. The Rovers Return has just acquired a smoking shelter, and Becky chainsmokes – supposedly a symbol of her delinquent past. We are seeing more smoking now than before!

Then there’s the innovative serial Life on Mars which set out to parody and contrast a very different 1970′s Britain with our modern world. An exaggerated cartoon-like representation could be forgiven as we were invited each week to journey back to a simpler time – one which we are secretly, guiltily nostalgic for – when sexism, racism and dubious police methods were supposedly normal and the term ‘political correctness’ hadn’t yet been coined. So, everybody smoked; not just down the pub, but in the police station, at crime scenes – everywhere.

Trouble is, what was amusing, tongue-in-cheek and fresh in Life on Mars, has influenced other programme makers who automatically have characters smoking to give a period feel to the scene. What’s worse, it’s a cliché which, when it is used by lazy directors and writers in this way, is so over-used as to completely detract from the programme.

For example, He Kills Coppers was a thee-part ITV sixties drama spoiled by incessant smoking. Not everybody smoked, even back then. And even the smokers paused for breath between fags.

Or take Golden Globe winnning series Mad Men from the United States. Set in the sixties, every office scene shows most people smoking (and often drinking spirits too!).

Perhaps it is inevitable that the pendulum has swung so far the other way. Maybe programme makers are quietly railing against the restriction of freedom to smoke. Or is there some covert influence at work? Tobacco companies are rich and powerful.

In any event, I don’t like it because firstly, it’s distracting, secondly it distorts history and thirdly it is unhealthy – both for the actors and in terms of the influence the media has on impressionable viewers. Smoking is not trivial or amusing. Tobacco smokers have a 50% chance of dying from smoking. In fact most do not survive to retirement age. It’s time that the media behaved in a more responsible way.