The Smoking Years tonight on BBC4
Wednesday, January 4, 2012 at 15:59 Last April I received the following email:
Dear Simon,
I'm working on a BBC Four television documentary using lots of archive and interviews to tell a narrative of British culture and our relationship with smoking over the years. I very much want it to reflect on the past and to bring up to date the changes that have all had an impact on the smoking public and where it goes from here.
It's not an anti-smoking film but a balanced and nostalgic look on a Britain that embraced the cigarette as a patriotic necessity and found it cool to smoke. We want to explore the science, politics and cultural changes over the 20th century that has directly impacted smoking.
I'd very much like to talk to you about the programme.
Kind regards,
I rang back and we had a long chat. The programme, I was told, is part of a series called Timeshift. I raised the civil liberties aspect and the issue of passive smoking, explaining that this was the reason why smokers have been increasingly victimised and isolated.
I added that the media had shown little interest in questioning the 'facts' so I suggested that she should speak to Joe Jackson. (I think I sent her a copy of Joe's seminal essay, The Smoking Issue).
I suggested one or two other people they might interview. (David Hockney was one.) I also recommended that they film on the smoking terrace at Boisdale where they could speak to ordinary people who enjoy smoking, but heard nothing more.
Tonight Timeshift: The Smoking Years is broadcast on BBC4 at 9.00pm. According to the BBC website:
Timeshift reveals the story of the creature that is 'the smoker'. How did this species arrive on our shores? Why did it become so sexy - and so dominant in our lives? Was there really a time when everywhere people could be found shrouded in a thick blue cloud?
Enlisting the help of Barry Cryer, Stuart Maconie and others, The Smoking Years tells the unnatural history of a quite remarkable - and now threatened - creature.
Barry Cryer and Stuart Maconie?! Cryer is a smoker but don't expect a spirited defence of tobacco. He's far more likely to tell a self-deprecating joke. Maconie is a ubiquitous talking head who has made a career appearing on programmes that require no more than the briefest of shallow soundbites.
As for the "others", the alarm bells started ringing as soon as I read the Radio Times preview:
It’s odd to recall how, 30-odd years ago, smokers were free to puff away on buses, in offices, cinemas and restaurants. Here’s the story of the rise and fall of smoking in a lively, entertaining documentary full of surprising snippets. Most interesting [my emphasis] is campaigner Cecilia Farren, who tells how she first put smokers on the retreat, and heading for the designated area.
Would that, by any chance, be the Cecilia Farren who once accused the tobacco industry of a "terror campaign" and, on another occasion, attempted to 'name and shame' me at a tobacco control conference in Edinburgh?
Farren is also the founder of GASP, "your one-stop shop for stop smoking, smokefree and tobacco education resources".
Can't wait to hear what she has to say and who (if anyone) takes issue with her comments. This, however, is the BBC so I won't be holding my breath.
Reader Comments (11)
It sounds very much like hate mongering and that was probably the aim all along. Comrade Beeb is in on the denormalisation, stigmatisation and Marginalisation of a minority group it's middle class snobs despise.
Creatures indeed! The only creatures are the monsters who made this programme and they should be the ones criminalised.
They disgust me.
Might be worth watching if only for ammo to write letters of complaint. I've no doubt that smokers will be presented as dinosaurs who've been banished in order to protect the health etc etc...
You can point out to the BBC that they shouldn't be advertising Farren's business.
Is it too much to ask that we might watch the programme before condemning it? I'm all for knocking the BBC in its coverage of smoking, but the clips on their web site don't look too bad for this program. It might be a decent historical piece, you never know.
Not an anti smoking film eh? When they were taliking about the ban, the background music was saying, "Something wonderful happened today".
What a load of rubbish
My comments are:
Biased Broadcasting Corporation.
That was a party political broadcast on behalf of the ASH Party.
Remember when we could drink alcohol in a restaurant and a pub.
Watched it and even as a non smoker I found it very biased to wards anti tobacco, and not a single mention of all the pub and club closures that the Draconian ban caused and all the unfortunates that ended up unemployed.
I asked the Director a question on their blog http://www.borjacantera.com/
"Why did you not feature the quotes by Matthew Wright and Stuart Maconie at the start of the piece? Respectively, Wright hinting that smoking isn’t an ‘addiction’ and might actually be enjoyable, and Maconie talking about ‘inflaming’ people?
Why use that as a teaser without expanding on what prompted what they were saying?"
Join the Torch of Freedom March 2012 in London to call for an end to the stigmatisation of all smokers - exactly 82 years to the day after the original that aimed to end the stigmatisation of women smokers in 1929.
http://patnurseblog.blogspot.com/2012/01/ooh-look-at-monkeys.html
never before has the symbol of the cigarette as freedom more relevant than in this modern age when civil liberties are under such grave threat.
Action on Smoking and Health It seems that when someone gets blocked (we did block them because the content of their posts was inappropriate and insulting),
This appeared on my face book page after I had made valid comments about the programme that they invited feedback for, all I pointed out that it was a far from unbiased prog, in that it said nothing about what the effects on the hospitality sector the ban had, it would appear that inappropriate means anything at all that deviates from the Ashist doctrine of intolerance.
I watched the programme and could not believe how one-sided it was. I found myself shouting at it, especially Cecilia Farren. Not once was there was a word said in defence of smokers, or how victimised they have become, so it was hardly well-balanced. Stuart Maconie also got on my nerves, suggesting how it was "unheard of" even to ASK to have a cigarette in someone else's house in this country. Obviously an extreme anti-smoker, or more likely an ex-smoker. It went from one extreme to another, showing public places absolutely choked with fumes, as they were in the '70s and '80s, compared with an absolute ban. No in-between or compromise allowed. I had been hoping against hope for a fair and balanced programme, but I have noticed for some time that the BBC tends to be very politically correct and often revisionist in their historical programmes, presenting one point of view as definitely the right one, and no other. Ah well, I might have known.