Michael Kelly: TV is hiding behind a smokescreen

The results of a survey of 5,000 adolescents published in the medical journal Thorax are hardly necessary to confirm what we already know intuitively – people are influenced by how high-profile personalities behave. This is particularly true of maturing kids who are searching for an identity and seek to create a cool image for themselves. They are influenced in the clothes they buy, the hairstyles they adopt, the drinks that they over-indulge in. Seeing tough, rebellious or sexy characters in movies smoke makes it seem glamorous and encourages them to try it out. The killer is that one third of those who try smoking become addicted.

According to the University of Bristol more than half the films shown in the UK that contain smoking are rated 15 or below, so children and young teenagers are clearly exposed. Films where smoking is featured include a number specifically targeted at children including Peter Pan, 101 Dalmatians and The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Bridget Jones and The Matrix are blockbusters that have also sold the smoking habit to kids.

The researchers make the salient point that, despite the enormous changes in attitudes towards smoking since the early days of Hollywood, when films with stars like Bette Davis, Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn set out to glamorise and, indeed, promote smoking, film-makers have not kept pace with the prevailing views of responsible societies but continue to portray the habit positively on screen without fear of censorship. The advice is simple. Films that depict actors smoking should be handed an automatic 18 certificate.

This proposal has not been entirely welcomed by the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC), which claims that its current guidelines are “proportionate; take due account of the available evidence of harm; and reflect the clear wishes of the public” which is an outstanding example of weak leadership on an issue of grave public concern.

Maybe the BBFC does not see its role as promoting healthy choices. Possibly it was its obduracy that led Liverpool in 2009 to take local action. It discovered that more than 1,600 of its teenagers take up smoking every year as a result of seeing smoking in films. So it used its powers as a city council to re-classify films. Glasgow, where the smoking habit is just as bad as any other UK city and which was prepared to ban the Life of Brian on flimsy moral grounds, might follow this example.

However, films, for all the cult status many of them acquire, have nothing like the power and influence of television. And it is clear, even to the casual observer, that smoking on television has increased. This is mainly due to the current trend for it to set its dramas in eras when smoking was prevalent. This list is long, The Hour (about the BBC itself), Madmen, The Killing (both the Danish and Seattle versions), feature persistent and intensive smokers without so much as a chest cold between them. The Inspector George Gently team may claim the smoking policeman adds to the authenticity of the 1960s setting. Yet the fact that he can get away with anachronisms like referring to “respite care” suggests the producers are not over-scrupulous in that direction, as long as the fags are featured.

Setting programmes in the days when 80 per cent of the adult population smoked gives a perfect platform to justify on the grounds of reality portraying smoking as natural, socially encouraged and safe. But some dramas go even further and introduce smoking when reality would argue against it. Thus in the first series of Downton Abbey those in service announce that they are nipping out of the kitchen for a fag – which employment conditions of the time would not have allowed. In any case, smoking did not become affordable for the working class until after the First World War when the development of cigarette making machines made tobacco cheap.

The spread of these programmes is so pervasive that one wonders what influence the tobacco companies themselves have had in encouraging this trend. It is certainly the kind of tactic of which they are well capable. They spent years and millions of pounds denigrating Sir Richard Doll’s historic 1950s epidemiological studies causally linking smoking to cancer. Their chief executives swore under oath to a US Congressional committee that they did not believe that tobacco was addictive. It is well within the bounds of credibility that these multi-nationals could set up or influence film and TV production companies or in other ways ensure exposure for their weapons of mass destruction. A denial would be comforting, if not necessarily credible.

Whatever that position, it seems to me that in a country where 107,000 people die each year through smoking, national television companies, particularly the BBC, would see it as their duty to do everything in their power to discourage, not promote, the use of tobacco.

However, when Scotland’s own The Hour chat show continues to be hosted by the ever-expanding Michelle McManus, it is clear that health messages are not writ large on the walls of the producers’ offices. Further proof of that programme’s cavalier approach to health came as new co-host Tam Cowan signed off his first stint with the words that he was “off for a fag”, comfortingly confirming to that programme’s target audience that a cigarette was the best way to relax after a hard shift.

In Britain, Scotland has the highest smoking prevalence rate at 25 per cent. Tobacco consumption is recognised as the UK’s single greatest cause of preventable illness and early death. This dictates that, despite the successful introduction of bans on smoking in public places, renewed action is called for. A total ban on the portrayal of smoking in films and on television need only be one of a series of initiatives which should include banning smoking in private cars, vilifying pregnant smokers, prohibiting smoking in all public parks and banning smokers from congregating outside offices. Enforcement is simple. At present police officers hide behind hedges with radar guns. Yet road traffic accidents only cause about 280 deaths each year. Redeploying them to harass smokers instead would be much more cost effective.