Councillor calls for smoke-free reality TV show
Friday, November 23, 2012 at 14:49 I was on BBC WM this morning.
A local councillor in Birmingham is complaining that the sight of a contestant smoking on I'm A Celebrity might encourage young people to take up the habit.
Former Coronation Street actress Helen Flanagan is the number one target for disapproval but given her performance to date the fact that she smokes is the last thing on most people's minds!
(I still can't decide whether she is a total dimwit or is following a brilliant game plan. I am beginning to favour the latter.)
Other smokers are former darts champion Eric Bristow and (I think) entertainer Brian Conley who left the show earlier this week after being described as "exhausted and malnourished".
Role models for impressionable teenagers? I think not.
Anyway, I've commented before on I'm A Celebrity and the success of smokers in this and other reality TV shows.
The truth is, the overwhelming majority of viewers don't care if someone smokes. As in real life it's not a factor that defines most people's response to another human being.
Hence many of the most successful reality TV contestants have been smokers (or, should I say, people who smoke). The list is endless.
In fact, one of the best I'm A Celebrity series featured Antony Worrall Thompson whose determination to hunt down more fags when facing dwindling supplies led to an overnight rebellion and one of the funniest episodes in the long-running programme.
With Antony being patron of Forest we kept a diary of the series and called it I'm A Smoker, Get Me Out Of Here!. Sadly it's no longer online but I remember it made me laugh.
Viewers were hugely entertained by AWT's exploits. He didn't win but that fact that he smoked and tried to break out of the camp to get more cigarettes didn't do him any harm in the eyes of the public because they kept him in until the last few days.
The same could be said of other smokers from Shaun Ryder to Dom Joly and many more.
It's ironic too that the sight of a contestant smoking on a reality TV show is one of the few things that in real life is quite normal. Everything else is completely fake!
PS. If smoking was an issue Helen Flanagan and Eric Bristow would have been booted off first. Instead the first two contestants voted off I'm A Celebrity 2012 were Nadine Dorries and Limahl, both non-smokers.
Reader Comments (2)
I'm truly amazed that Nadine once said on Question Time that she loved the ban because "my clothes don't stink anymore" and now she's living in shit in the jungle and prepared to eat kangaroo testicles and bugs of various varieties.
Some people are truly weird and they certainly have their priorities all wrong.
Dorries said her experience in the jungle has humbled her - I wonder if that also accounts for her views on people who smoke and their choice to smoke anywhere a million miles from the likes of her.
This man, councillor Steve Bedser, is nothing more than a band-wagon chaser – his ilk are a dime a dozen. Don’t elevate him above his current status of non-entity.
Please just allow him to fester quietly at the bottom of the food chain.
Now – where’s my snooze button.
ZZZZzzzzzzz.