Saturday
Jun072014
Anti-smoking propaganda is a TV turn-off
Saturday, June 7, 2014 at 9:00 The public has voted with their remote controls.
The viewing figures for the BBC's anti-tobacco documentary, Burning Desire: The Seduction of Smoking, are reported as follows:
Part one (May 29) had 589k viewers, just 2.9% of the viewing public. Part two (June 5) was even more of a turn off with only 541k viewers (2.8%).
Digital Spy has the figures here and here.
Pity the stats don't reveal how many viewers were taxpayer funded tobacco control campaigners!
The majority, is my guess. Lol.
PS. In the same time slot on the same channel on May 22 a Horizon programme attracted 921k viewers, 4.4% of the viewing public.
Burning Desire: The Seduction of Smoking couldn't even match that. Says it all.
Reader Comments (6)
I expect the viewers also included tobacco industry shills like you and that smug git from BAT who stank up the screen worse than the fags his company is peddling to 10 year olds.
I've found that very few people are bothered about the smoking issue - either way.
The only people who make a fuss about it are those who are paid to keep banging on about it, and those of us who fight their hate and scaremongering campaign.
In fact the vast majority of people have said that, even if they don't personally like smoking, there should be choice for smokers who should be treated equally and with respect.
I doubt that there are anywhere near 589K tobacco control campaigners in the UK even allowing for the governments largesse with respect to funding disingenuous parasites.
"...that smug git from BAT who stank up the screen worse than the fags.." Ooh - what's this then? Fourth hand smoke? Are mentally ill smokerphobics now claiming they are harmed by the very sight of someone who sells tobacco - and their paranoid imagination means they can even smell smoke when it isn't there?
I wouldn't be surprised but I am amazed that Govt panders to these people who really should get treatment to prevent them harming themselves with fantasy illnesses and harming others around them with paranoid and unfounded hate campaigns.
Linda Bauld claimed in her smoking ban review that the ban had no adverse affects on the hospitality industry here in the Uk. A blatant lie. Who is she, to get a space on prime time tv?
The Uk smoking ban was brought in on the back of scientific fraud that shs harms those around us, when there is in fact, no real evidence of that. So why should smokers care about any smoking ban when the truth is that shs isn't harmful at all. In the face of this, the Uk ban should be reformed to let adults choose smoking or non smoking areas inside adult only venues.
http://news.heartland.org/newspaper-article/2008/07/01/scientific-evidence-shows-secondhand-smoke-no-danger
Smoking bans mean many thousands of people have stop using pubs here and have become, unfairly socially excluded.
I’m with Pat on this one. In my experience, most people, (even those who pre-ban thought in a rather disinterested way that it was “probably a good thing”) are, plain and simple, bored with all things tobacco-related. Tobacco Control has, I think, rather over-egged the pudding over the years by blaming smoking for, or linking smoking to, pretty much every ailment known to man. Even most of the drones have rumbled the fact that smoking can’t possibly be a major factor in that many illnesses – otherwise virtually no-one in Europe would ever have died before it was introduced, unless of course they were run over by a horse and cart or met with some other misfortune.
I think that programmes like this, as I mentioned in a previous comment, have been initiated largely by increasingly-worried Tobacco Control activists who can see their power and influence slipping steadily away from them through sheer lack of interest on behalf of the general public. The low, and falling, number of people watching this slightly desperate attempt to flog a dead horse back to life is a clear indication that their fears are well founded. And about time, too!
I said long before the smoking ban came in, that if it did it could well mark the beginning of the end for Tobacco Control, and so it has turned out. Maybe one day it’ll dawn on them that they’ve been dumped on from a great height by the powers-that-be, every bit as much as smokers have. They have yet to grasp the fact that they were never the “highly respected experts in the field” which their “friends” in powerful circles liked to massage their egos by pretending they were, and that their only real use was to give the artificial impression of “huge public support” for a ban. Now that it’s here, their usefulness has all but expired, and in fact their ongoing demands for increasingly silly or unreasonable extensions to it are beginning to render them more of a pain in the backside than anything else. If they don’t learn to stop batting on, and on, and on, and on, and ….. I strongly suspect that they could find their much-loved funding being rather severely cut, and soon.