Clive Turner and me

I’ve just received a lovely email from Clive Turner.

Clive who?

According to a profile published in PR Week in 1996 shortly before his retirement:

Turner, 64, has been in the tobacco industry since 1962 when he became deputy PR manager for WD & HO Wills. Other than an 11-year stint as Texaco public affairs chief, he has been with tobacco ever since.

As well as fronting the UK industry he also carried the torch abroad, setting up international PR divisions for tobacco company Carreras Overseas and working as MD of the Hong Kong-based Asian Tobacco Council.

I first met Clive in 1989, long before I worked for Forest. I was director of the Media Monitoring Unit which monitored TV current affairs programmes for political bias and I decided to set up a side project called the Centre for Media Research and Analysis.

Clive was working for the Tobacco Advisory Council (later renamed the Tobacco Manufacturers’ Association) and was frequently on television and radio. I contacted him with the idea of writing a report about media coverage of the smoking debate.

In those pre-internet days press cuttings were delivered every morning to PR companies, NGOs and bodies like the TAC where they helped inform executives of relevant news stories and were filed for future reference.

Clive gave me access to the TAC's library of cuttings and for several weeks I worked from a small room at their office in Stag Place, Victoria, drowning slowly in a sea of paper.

Aside from popping in every day to say hello, Clive never once tried to influence me or comment on the progress of the report which was just as well because I found the process far more difficult than analysing a television current affairs programme.

‘Smoked Out' was published several months later and we've stayed in touch – intermittently – ever since despite the fact that he’s spent the last two decades in Cyprus where he moved with his wife Diane following his retirement.

Now in his eighties he writes a regular ‘Expat View’ column for the Cyprus Mail, the local English language newspaper.

One article, published in August 2017, will sound familiar to anyone who witnessed Clive’s media appearances all those years ago:

Undoubtedly there have been tens of thousands of people around the world who have been victims of tobacco, but then there are also huge numbers of even very heavy lifetime smokers who have suffered absolutely nothing at all.

This inexplicable fact infuriates the quite rabid anti-smoking brigade such as the UK’s Action On Smoking and Health – ASH – whose neurotic and extreme swivel-eyed health fascism has been a feature of the anti-smoking culture for many years.

Here in Cyprus we have one of the highest smoking incidence figures in Europe, yet one of its lowest lung cancer statistics. Nobody knows why this is. But again, it infuriates the anti-smoking activists.

“We do not attack smokers or condemn smoking,” says ASH on its website, which has to be one of the most explicit pieces of double-think imaginable.

As for those media appearances, he wrote:

I must have done hundreds of always hostile live and recorded radio, television and print media interviews. Following these, I could expect unspeakable and anonymous messages, not excluding death threats. You name them, I got them.

I can remember one interview out of town which involved the then ASH director who refused to share a cab with me back into central London “on principle”.

And on another occasion, I shared a live interview with the author of the excellent book The Easy Way To Stop Smoking. The author, Allen Carr, who later died of lung cancer, described me in the studio as “a slug, someone who should be stepped on and disposed of” – at which the interviewer invited me to respond.  

I said to Allen Carr that his book had sold millions and made him extremely wealthy, but it probably wasn’t the prime reason why smokers quit when the cost of their habit was unquestionably the deciding factor.

I added that rather than get further worked up and red faced, he might be better off having a cigarette and a lie down – which brought loud and prolonged laughter from the studio audience.

See: Smoking debate more complicated than you think (Cyprus Mail).

I was hoping he might be able to attend Forest's 40th anniversary dinner in June but he rarely visits the UK these days so we’re unlikely to see him.

Nevertheless it’s good to know he’s in fine spirits and as combative as ever!

See also ‘From the archive: Clive Turner’s Big Breakfast’.