The Smoking Years Timeshift

-Are we on?

-Yes.

-I'm sorry. Have we started?

OK. My first cigarette of the day. Here we go, the cliche.

Cigarette and a cup of tea.

First one of the day.

And the second one...

with another cup of tea, so maybe I'm addicted to tea!

If you want to call it an addiction. Maybe it's because it's very nice.

That'll get them inflamed, won't it? Come on!

It was subliminal. These things that people were doing, it affected your behaviour.

Smoking is something that cut across all class, cultural, gender things.

In every area of life throughout Britain,

we have lived with a highly conspicuous creature.

A being that is distinctly sociable, with well-defined habits

and quite simple needs.

Some girls, it's the way they smoke a cigarette.

They're licking their lips and looking at you at the same time.

And you think, "Oh, God".

This species has been native to our shores for generations,

ever since the early explorers returned from the Caribbean.

But it has come to face the double threat of encroaching predators

and shrinking habitat.

We know this creature as The Smoker.

And this is their story.

The smoker took one of its earliest

and most significant evolutionary steps during the Victorian era.

At this time, smoking was generally regarded as a lowly act.

A habit Queen Victoria herself frowned upon.

The Victorians have a problem with pleasure.

A mass-consuming society is bringing all forms of new objects

and items of mass consumption and new things to be enjoyed,

but they feel guilty about this.

They are, in a sense, a bunch of prudes.

They are against gambling. They set up organisations against alcohol.

And so, in many senses, they're against smoking as well.

And so when people begin to smoke more in the Victorian period,

they have to rationalise what they are doing.

They can't be seen to just be enjoying tobacco purely for itself.

They have to do something to make it fit into the wider ethos of the age.

In the same way that a good wine connoisseur

would know all about the cultivation of his wine,

the Victorian smoker launched into an obsessive pursuit

to discover everything he could about the tobacco leaf.

And from then, once you've made tobacco into an act that only

the true connoisseur could appreciate, then you can start

talking about more individualised aspects of one's smoking pleasure.

By now, the smoker had been convinced that tobacco

not only improved the intellect and powers of concentration,

but could help define the identity of the individual.

If one was going to be an individual smoker,

that smoked differently from everyone else that was expressing this

kind of culture of bourgeois masculinity,

then the real hero of all the smokers was, of course, Sherlock Holmes,

because he smoked like nobody else.

What do you make of it all?

Well, it all seems to me to be a most dark and sinister business.

Certainly when he was agitated and trying to think,

he would smoke rather furiously.

But other times, in a particularly difficult case,

it was a "three-pipe problem".

-It seems elementary to me.

-Marvellous, Watson.

Sherlock's expertise doesn't just stretch to his own smoking habits,

it stretched to everybody else's as well.

And I think at one point he told Dr Watson that he was planning

a monograph on the different types of ashes of 300 forms of tobacco.

If we take this path, we may see something of interest.

Throughout its history, the smoker has co-opted advances

made by others.

As manufacturing techniques improved,

American industrialist James Albert Bonsack invented

the first cigarette rolling machine and the date was 1880.

Smoking would never be the same again.

In London, on Bond Street, you had Mr Philip Morris

and you had Mr Benson and Mr Hedges, but the Wills brothers

were able to make cigarettes readily affordable in huge numbers,

selling for just a penny each.

Brands like Woodbines, Cinderella,

became the biggest-selling cigarettes in Britain.

And hence, from the end of the 19th century onwards,

you had a mass market for cigarettes that could easily compete with

and outstrip the market for cigars or snuff,

or any of the other tobacco products.

By the dawn of the 20th century, tobacco was an acceptable

and enjoyable habit for a growing number of smokers.

And would soon find a new and powerful champion.

You refer to the Edwardian era as the golden age,

without a shadow of a doubt.

And bear in mind that Queen Victoria had passed away in 1901,

and Edward VII, the new king,

at the first levee that he held, issued the immortal words,

"Gentlemen, you may smoke."

Because his mother had been violently against smoking

throughout her incredibly long reign,

whilst he, perhaps as a rebellion against his mother's attitude,

had always been a cigar smoker since the 1860s or 1870s.

So, there we had a period great wealth in the United Kingdom.

It was a time that so many wonderful products - champagnes, cognacs -

became embedded here in the United Kingdom.

And certainly Havana cigars were an essential part

of that historical development.

In 1914, the British Empire entered the First World War.

The Western Front became a breeding ground as the trenches created

perfect conditions for smokers.

It was a great comfort to everyone to have cigarettes.

It did something to their nerves that needed to be done.

And I've seen people absolutely confused before they had

a cigarette, and then as soon as they had their first drag, as they

called it, they'd settle down and I could see the relief on their faces.

In the circumstances in which we were living in those days,

in the mud, in holes in the ground, in trenches,

sometimes in expectation of anything that could happen,

the cigarette was something they looked forward to,

and everyone would want a fag.

Before they went over the top,

they would have that drag and then they would figure out a way,

because they would have something else to do.

There were campaigns

and money-raising efforts at home to buy the Tommies packs of cigarettes.

And by the end of the war, the cigarette had not just become

a very popular item, it was almost a patriotic item.

# Pack up your troubles in your old kitbag and smile, smile, smile

# While you've Lucifer to light your fag... #

But for a different class of military smoker,

the humble cigarette was not enough.

Cigars were reserved for the officer class, shall we say.

There is a story about what was known as the NAAFI,

which was buying all the products for the army,

and he got an order for 1,000 cigars for Sir John French,

who was the commander of the British Expeditionary Force in France,

so they established a relationship,

but then he gave him an order for seven million of them.

And it's still the largest order ever achieved for a Cuban cigar

anywhere in the world at any time, as a single order.

And I suppose it indicated how long the NAAFI thought the war was going to last.

# Pack up your troubles in your old kitbag and smile, smile, smile. #

When the Tommies finally did return home,

they found the war had created yet another new habitat for the smoker,

as factory life had encouraged women to take up tobacco.

The women went out to work more, they were working in factories,

and they were under very much the same stresses as both

the men at home and the men fighting on a front line.

So they turned to cigarettes in the same way as the men did.

# Puff

# Puff

# Puff

# Puff your cares away... #

Although women were now lighting up more than ever before,

this particular creature was still discouraged from public displays.

If a woman smoked a cigarette she was looked upon as very, very unusual.

Some did it as a bravado.

And that was mostly what they did in those days.

It wasn't very common.

Very seldom did you find a woman smoker, and it was looked down upon.

In the street, it was unladylike. You know?

But possibly on the tops of buses.

There was assumptions that smoking meant you were sexually promiscuous.

Obviously, a woman who was very well-to-do could

get away with it because, clearly, her reputation was established,

but in general, smoking in the streets was frowned upon.

# Take me with you. #

But the smoker is a species prepared to alter its own environment.

In the early 20s,

women in the big cities of Britain started to challenge conventions,

consciously making themselves visible while enjoying a good smoke.

Certainly the big cities like London, smoking becomes

increasingly commonplace amongst middle-class women.

And when the mass observation did some surveys on smoking

they found women talking about how they practised smoking

and how they persevered, even though it tasted awful.

But they persevered because they wanted to be able to smoke

and wanted to be seen to smoke.

It's a way of saying you're a modern woman -

liberated, successful, attractive.

There were increasingly images of stylish, healthy,

sporty, successful women smoking.

So it's a very strong association between smoking

and the good life, the active life.

In the Twenties and Thirties,

you could find doctors commenting on how smoking a cigarette

is really good for the nerves and should be encouraged.

Naturally, it gets picked up in relation to producing

the slim, modern body for a woman.

One series of adverts said something like, you have an upper-class

woman talking to her butler, and she says, "I'm going to replace

"the unwholesome habit of nibbling with the wholesome habit of smoking."

While in the UK prejudices against women smoking were on the wane,

in America, women were still constricted

by the taboo of smoking in public.

Once more, the smoker called upon its intellect to help it develop.

In the late 1920s, Sigmund Freud's nephew Edward Bernays,

a New York PR executive, was asked to help.

One day, Mr George Hill, president of the American tobacco company,

called me in and said, "We're losing half of our market."

And I said, "Why, Mr Hill?"

He said, "There's a taboo by men that does not permit women

"to smoke in public.

"What can we do about breaking down that taboo?"

Bernays' research suggested that the cigarette

was a symbol of male power and of the penis.

If women could be shown a connection between cigarettes

and the ideal of sexual power, then women would smoke.

He staged a publicity stunt during a parade where women smoked openly,

calling their cigarettes "Torches of Freedom".

So I called up a debutante friend of mine and asked her to get another friend

and to walk in the Easter Parade lighting "Torches of Freedom",

to protest man's inhumanity to women by the taboo of smoking.

He knew this would be an outcry and he knew

all of the photographers would be there to capture this moment.

And so he was ready with a phrase,

which was "Torches of Freedom",

so here you have a symbol, women - young women, debutantes -

smoking a cigarette in public with a phrase that means anybody

who believes in this kind of equality pretty much has to support them

in the ensuing debate about this, because torches of freedom.

And so, the next day, this was not just in all of the New York papers,

it was across the United States and around the world.

And from that point forward, female cigarette sales began to rise.

He had made them socially acceptable with a single symbolic act.

Bernays strategy paid off and now women were freely

smoking cigarettes on the streets of America.

The smoker began to be seen far and wide,

with Hollywood eager to capture its behaviour in films.

Cigarette smoking starts appearing in some of the silent movies

in the 1920s, but towards the end of the Twenties,

and certainly by 1930, cigarette smoking becomes commonplace.

Given that cinema was such a common pastime,

they were exposed to lots of filmic representations of smoking.

The cinema is fundamentally important to why people

want to smoke in the first place.

The movies taught men and women to smoke together,

so whilst the films might offer great images of individualism

for men and women, they also taught people how to smoke as companions.

In Now, Voyager in 1942, Paul Henreid famously lights

two cigarettes in his mouth before passing one over to Bette Davis.

Shall we just have a cigarette on it?

Yes.

You felt that you were like the film stars.

I remember Bette Davis and Paul Henreid.

When he lit his two cigarettes in Now, Voyager

when they were about to part, and it was very sad and dramatic

and he lit these two cigarettes in his mouth and he handed her one,

and it was poignant somehow.

So everybody started doing that.

What a good idea. With your girlfriend or your wife,

"Here you are, darling. Here's yours."

A lot of us burnt our fingers because the cigarette would

stick to your lip, and you'd run your fingers down it

and burn them on the end.

We could never do it as well as he did.

I don't know how many takes he had to do in that film.

Maybe he didn't do it right the first time.

But these are sort of iconic images you have of people,

and, of course, it had the air of sophistication about it.

People talking, conversation, the dialogue, that was part of it,

that was part of the whole picture.

In American films especially, and particularly the films

of Humphrey Bogart, smoking becomes a highly individualised activity.

It becomes central to appearing as a lone individual,

somebody who's apart from the crowd, somebody who is different,

even though you're doing the same thing as everyone else.

I think the importance of cinema is it actually introduces

the sexual vocabulary of smoking.

What's wrong with you?

Nothing you can't fix.

Bacall and Bogart in The Big Sleep,

you see the two cigarettes together in the ashtray.

The cigarette is used to suggest that they get off together.

No more need to be said.

In 1939 came the Second World War, and with it,

cigarette consumption exploded.

Such was the influence of smokers that it was said that the war

saw Britain sign a deal with America which meant spending

more money buying cigarettes than on tanks, ships or planes.

The Army's great leader remembered his men,

personally distributing cigarettes sent to him for the purpose.

Monty went round handing out cigarettes to soldiers

and encouraged everybody to smoke, and certainly in the war we smoked.

And it really was when you were rather short of food

and food was rather boring,

smoking was quite a help, I must say.

Churchill and his colleagues ensured that many tons of British shipping

was devoted to bringing tobacco over from the United States.

This was at a time of rationing,

so one can imagine the controversy when non-smokers were to find

that crucial supplies of what they might wish to consume and eat

were being given up to assure that smoking products would reach the UK.

Churchill became the most famous cigar smoker in history,

I would say.

And because he loved cigars, the Cubans actually sent him

thousands of cigars every year throughout World War II

because they wanted him to stay focused and de-stressed,

and so they said, you can have all these cigars and smoke away,

because we'll look after you

and you can look after the rest of the world.

Ironically enough, Churchill never smoked a whole cigar.

He would just play at them.

He'd put this bit of brown paper round it,

call it his Belly Bando,

and puff away and stop it getting damp.

He'd only smoke about a third of it, maybe less,

and he'd throw it away.

Then he'd get another one and do this throughout the day.

Wartime paper shortages led Churchill to ban cigarette cards,

which had been a popular collectible since Victorian times.

The cards had often featured patriotic themes,

such as army uniforms and combat shirts.

Little did Churchill know that these cigarette cards were now

helping the German war effort.

Now this was a set issued of 50 cards depicting lots

of different British warships, and in the late 1930s an advert

was put in the newspapers offering to buy these sets and then,

in actual fact, Germans were using these to identify the enemy ships,

and destroy them and so on.

One of the U-boats was captured and one of these albums was found inside.

It was estimated that over 80% of British troops

returned home from the war as smokers.

Everything possible was done for them.

Cigarettes and a snack for each man on his way home.

But among the German military,

smoking may have been less popular for a little known reason.

Hitler, who was an opponent of smoking,

made sure that Nazi scientists conducted

some experiments into smoking and its links with lung cancer.

It wasn't a great deal of research,

but there was sufficient for them to believe that there was a link,

and it's research that could have been used productively.

And the thing with the German papers is that it was carried out

by Nazi scientists,

and Nazi science didn't have a great reputation after the war.

So much of it was forgotten about,

several of the scientists were killed in combat or went AWOL,

and there wasn't the will to believe that the Nazis had found

something that nobody else in the world had found.

Nobody that is, except an eccentric young Glaswegian GP named

Lennox Johnson, who was conducting his own research into smoking.

As early as the 1920s, he was speculating about the likely

long-term health effects smokers were exposing themselves to.

Lennox Johnson was an extraordinary character,

because he said that cigarettes, and specifically nicotine,

were addictive decades before this was being said by governments.

And he was saying that smoking caused lung cancer

many years before this was being said by anybody in the English language.

He was a passionate hater of smoking

and believed that England could be made completely tobacco free.

And yet, he was virtually ignored in his own lifetime.

He is almost entirely forgotten about, and yet,

he was so far ahead of his time.

He was fascinated to the point of obsession with nicotine itself.

Now when he gave up smoking, he went to a local chemist

and bought himself a small bottle of nicotine.

Not pure of course, because it would immediately kill you.

Heavily diluted noses of nicotine, but still very dangerous.

And began injecting himself with them.

And he nearly died on several occasions.

On the last of these occasions, his wife found him lying on

the floor in the house, close to death, and managed to revive him.

Johnson then gathered 35 volunteers to carry out

the most comprehensive nicotine experiment of the era.

He went on to discover that after being injected with nicotine

over a period of time, those taking part in the trial

began to prefer nicotine to cigarettes,

and that when the injections were withheld

the volunteers would develop cravings.

By the early Forties, Johnson was not only able to link smoking

to lung cancer, but he had also devised

a nicotine replacement therapy to wean smokers off cigarettes.

But even after obsessive attempts to get his findings published,

Johnson was repeatedly ignored

by the entire British medical establishment.

This causes him some frustration.

He resolves to burn down the offices of the British Medical Association.

He plots to smack Churchill's cigar out of his mouth on a public visit.

He goes to see Sylvia Pankhurst, the suffragette,

for advice on how to get arrested.

He didn't go through with any of these things, but was clearly looking for publicity,

and it was always publicity for his discoveries that he craved

and that, on balance, he simply didn't receive.

In 1948, Johnson begged for one more chance.

Applying to the Medical Research Council for a grant

to undertake official research into lung cancer,

only to find out that two epidemiologists,

Richard Doll and Bradford Hill, had already been given similar funding.

Within two years of starting their research,

Doll and Hill discovered there was a clear link between smoking and lung cancer.

Their conclusions were that cigarette smoking

was the cause of about 95% of lung cancers and then as we did

the further studies in which we followed up people

who smoked different amounts,

we found that it was the cause of a lot of other diseases as well.

It's not surprising when you realise

that there are 4,000 different chemicals in tobacco smoke.

The evidence was overwhelming.

And now, unlike with Johnson,

government and health authorities were ready to listen.

Coffin nails. Yes, that's what cigarettes are,

according to the Medical Research Council.

We've heard something of the kind before, yet almost everybody

smokes, including thousands young enough to know better.

And as smoking is nowadays allowed nearly everywhere,

it's on the increase year after year.

So is lung cancer, a grim fact that can no longer be airily dismissed,

certainly not by the Ministry of Health.

In less than a decade,

it had been proved that smoking was a direct cause of lung cancer.

But smokers displayed a remarkable reluctance to accept the science.

The culture of smoking is so entrenched in the 1940s

and 1950s and into the 1960s that the health claims that were made

against smoking by scientists in the early Fifties,

by the Ministry of Health in 1957, by the Royal College of Physicians

in 1962, the cumulative effect of all of these was not that great at all.

Surveys have shown that many smokers,

the majority of smokers in this country,

don't really accept that there is any risk in cigarette smoking.

If I'm going to get anything, I'll get it in any case.

It's all based on statistics, that's one of the things that's wrong.

I don't believe that much in statistics.

My father died at 62

from congestion of the lungs which was caused through smoking.

He smoked a lot. But it doesn't worry me.

It really wasn't news.

Cigarettes were known as coffin nails in the 1940s and earlier,

so it's not as if people didn't associate it with lung cancer.

They were called coffin nails!

Smoke that, and it's another nail in your coffin. It was a joke.

So when the lung cancer thing came along,

to be honest I don't think people were really bothered.

None of my friends or family, none of them ever discussed it.

Yet my grandfather died of lung cancer.

But you didn't think about it.

And it hadn't really got the message home at that point,

so we just carried on smoking.

These health statistics that you are slinging at us are entirely negative.

No-one will stop me smoking by frightening me with figures,

any more than they'll stop me driving on the motorway like a madman

by showing me a film on television of crashed cars.

So what we have in the 1950s is this extraordinary situation

in which people become scientists.

Likewise, the anecdote that one's grandmother lived to 95

and smoked every day of her life

and she was always fit as a fiddle is a scientific claim.

And this is what people were doing.

Now obviously the story is complicated.

The tobacco companies denied there was any link between smoking

and lung cancer, and other forms of ill-health.

So far, what are the conclusions reached by organisation?

I think there is need for much more research over a wide area

and, in my opinion, to single out smoking as a causal agent is,

on the evidence to date, completely unjustified.

Thank you very much, Sir, for your help.

Thank you very much for letting me put our views forward.

-You better have a cigarette before you go home.

-Thank you!

Battle lines were now drawn between a complacent tobacco industry

and a concerned medical profession.

With their profits at risk,

the cigarette companies, challenged more and more by scientists

and government, needed a strategy to protect their interests.

I read this report, cynically,

because I'd had several comments to me, "Have you read this nonsense,

"old boy, that these doctor chappies are coming out with?"

So I read it in that frame of mind, and instead of which,

I began to think, "What are we doing? We're killing people."

Should this be happening?

And I expected to find everyone as concerned as I was,

and as worried as I was.

And instead of which, I found just the opposite.

Instead of saying, "Is this true? If so, what are we to do?"

"Should we start research to counter it?

Should we try to get a new form of cigarette?"

Instead of that reaction, the reaction was,

"How can we rubbish this?"

The tobacco lobby quickly found ways to counter the findings.

First, I must repeat that we do not accept the sweeping assertions

in the report incriminating smoking.

But do you accept what the government has said?

No, I do not accept what the government has said.

There are too many gaps in knowledge,

too many inconsistencies in the evidence.

One of those gaps, and a pretty yawning and smelly gap at that,

is air pollution.

The latest research suggests that if you want to cut your chances

of incurring lung cancer in half, you'd better emigrate from this country.

The tobacco industry produced its own scientific research,

trying to disprove the link between smoking and lung cancer.

Worried, but confused, the smoker, unique creature that it is,

responded mostly by burying its head in the sand.

In a big town like London, fumes from cars, trucks,

factories, that sort of thing.

I don't think smoking has got very much to do with it.

With the 1950s turning into the 1960s,

smoking remained stubbornly cool.

# I was born in a bunk

# Momma died and my daddy got drunk... #

As well as adults,

children were constantly surrounded by images of smoking.

I started smoking when I was about 12 years old.

You couldn't afford to buy anything, so you got straws.

You got your milk every day, your free milk in the school.

You kept the straw and you'd try to smoke it.

A stupid thing to do, but that's what kids did.

After a while, we had some pocket money.

I'd climb over the wall in my playground in the lunch break

and run down the road for everybody and bring the cigarettes back

and we'd have private smokes down there.

We were smoking every opportunity.

If you went into a newsagent's or sweet shop,

certainly in the North of England, I have no reason to imagine

it wouldn't be everywhere, you'd see a sweet jar, one of those

plastic or glass jars, containing gobstoppers, bull's-eyes or humbugs

and it would say "Seps", and it would have loose cigarettes,

individual cigarettes taken from packets and put in.

"Seps", presumably from separates,

and they would be on sale for 5p for one cigarette.

And even then, I think I realised that these are for school children.

So they were marketed quite clearly by your cheery, local,

amiable newsagent, nice Mr Chadwick, in his cardigan,

quite clearly saying, "Here, I want to sell, illegally,

"a dangerous drug to small children."

And no one thought, "Oh, my God, that's wicked!",

it was just how weird, yet both cosy and normal,

and odd and transgressive, smoking was in our culture.

# Bring her back to Tobacco Road. #

The wide availability of cigarettes

and the number of young people taking up smoking

placed the cigarette at the very centre of a teenager's journey to adulthood.

I was the convent schoolgirl that had never gone out with the boy.

I went to university,

and I was absolutely bewitched by everything that was "it".

The reality for me was, I started smoking because the girl who

was in the next door room, she was the magnet for every bloke on campus.

She was it.

She looked like Francoise Hardy, who was this absolute amazing

French singer, who all the boys lusted after.

And she was the smoker and she got all the blokes after her

and I wanted to be like her.

You know, the old cliche about peer pressure,

it went down a treat with me.

Your first encounter with smoking as a vice,

as a kind of sensual pleasure, was a real right of passage.

Coming almost, I would think, almost simultaneously, with sex.

I knew it was going to happen and, for me, it was about the age of 14

or 15 and I remember Leonard Brown, one night when we were drinking

cider with the some girls in the park he said, "Do you want a cig?"

I smoked it, and I thought that's disgusting.

He said to me, "But tomorrow you'll want another." And I did.

The cigarette was an indispensable tool for courting girls.

At the same time, women were using it to accentuate their seductive powers.

Some girls, it's the way they smoke a cigarette,

it's like they're licking their lips and looking at you

at the same time, and you think, "Oh God, if I could just be there. Oh, please."

Just put the cigarette down.

You just wanted to be where the cigarette was.

We're all thinking it's a phallic image. And it did look terribly sexy.

But not all girls could do it.

Well, it was part of the social intercourse,

offering the girl a cigarette.

It was a social ritual.

Men would carry round matches and lighters in the hope

that they'd meet a woman who'd take a cigarette out

and sort of look at you and say, "Have you got a light, please?"

If she liked you, she would like you and ask you.

And if she was very beautiful and there were several men around,

they all started licking their lips, and thinking she was gorgeous,

and she was sat with a cigarette in her hand, she'd choose you.

And you'd be going like this, shaking, and she would sort of hold

your hand and look in your eyes and you thought, "I've pulled."

And later on, if you're really lucky,

you'd have a cigarette after you've had the sex, you see,

or if you didn't want sex, you'd go straight to the cigarette.

Cigarettes were also seen as essential fashion accessories.

So all these very cool birds, as we called them then,

with mini-skirts, going around and smoking

looking really cool in the clubs, doing all this and sort of dancing

and smoking as they're going along, that is the whole look.

It's just amazing.

Smoking is something that cut across all class, cultural, gender things.

If you smoked roll-ups, you were either a tramp, an old man,

or you were kind of hippyish.

There were very, very mild cigarettes, like Silk Cut,

which girls used to smoke.

Then if you fancied yourself as a European film-maker,

you smoked Gitanes.

Free-spirited American, you smoked Marlboro Reds.

If you were really kind of wacky, you smoked Sobranie,

that were different-coloured, or if you were a bog-standard bloke,

you smoked B&H gold, the ultimate bloke, beer monster fag.

So the brand you smoked was like the music you listened to.

It was like the clothes you wore.

It was much more than just a smoke, it said something about yourself

and the image you wanted to project to the world.

Smoking had long infiltrated the visual media.

And had been used to communicate what kind of person you were.

In every film, you almost certainly saw a smoker.

You had rebel smokers. James Dean smoked a cigarette, he was a rebel.

Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront, he's another rebel.

And you kind of associate it with them.

You didn't realise at the time that you're taking all this in.

It was subliminal.

These things people were doing affected your behaviour.

I was searching as a teenager for what I was going to be like when I grew up.

it wasn't quite sure, but what I certainly wanted to do at some point

was to behave like Yul Brynner and get the respect this man had.

The start of The Magnificent Seven,

when these guys are looking for someone to help them

stop these bandits taking over their village.

So they go to look for these guys,

and there's Yul Brynner on this hearse, dressed in black,

and Steve McQueen gets on board with his shotgun

and they ride up the hill to Boot Hill Cemetery.

And they confronted this group of men.

Hold it.

Hold it right there.

Anything wrong?

Turn that rig around and get it down the hill.

Ugh!

At which point, Yul Brynner looks at him like that,

and he strikes a match and smokes it, and he is looking at them

while he's smoking and just does that.

He's already shot a couple of guys,

and they know just by looking at him that he will kill them.

And he just gets the cigar and it looked so cool.

And he just looks at them while he is lighting it and watches them,

and they know he's serious.

Because the next thing he will do when he drops that match

is shoot all of them.

That was just brilliant. I realised it looked cool to look like that.

That you looked like somebody who can take care of yourself,

you could handle a situation, because I've got the cigar.

I'm looking at you and you know because I've got this big cigar

I'm a serious guy and I can deal with all kinds of stuff,

because I'm all grown-up.

Maybe that's what it was.

But it wasn't just the images on the big screen that made an impression.

In the Sixties, watching a television programme was much more of an event.

I absolutely loved Thunderbirds as a child,

but when I went back and looked in detail through all 32 episodes

of Thunderbirds there were through things that really struck me.

One was that there was smoking in almost all the episodes.

Lady Penelope always smokes a cigarette

right from the beginning of every single episode.

She stands in front of her pink Rolls Royce,

so it's associated with wealth, health,

happiness and very positive images.

The other thing that really struck me was the way in which different types

of characters smoked in different ways and smoked different products.

So, for example, Jeff Tracy, the head of International rescue,

the ex-astronaut and millionaire, he always smoked cigars.

Once again, through these columns,

we thank International Rescue for their invaluable help.

Without them, the Carter family would have perished.

Well, that's good. Kind of makes the job worthwhile.

The clean-living Tracy Boys tend to all smoke cigarettes.

I was really shocked, because the only person

I remembered as smoking from my own memory of it was Lady Penelope,

so I was just really surprised to see the images that I'd remembered

and, equally, the images that I completely hadn't taken in myself

as a child.

In the Sixties, these images were ubiquitous, whereas now,

the way that smoking was portrayed seemed really quite amazing

and almost horrifying to us now.

There's lots of things going on at a time when a young person

might try their first cigarette and go on to continue smoking.

Popular culture tells us that this is a sexy, fun thing to do.

They see it in films and adverts.

What they don't realise is actually the tobacco industry

is specifically targeting them.

They need to, because one in two of its users are going to die.

You've got to recruit new ones to keep your numbers up.

In spite of almost 20 years of reports linking smoking to lung cancer,

by the 1970s, more than half the British adult population smoked.

Many people, perhaps half the people smoking cigarettes

in this country are, in technical terms, heavily dependent,

in old-fashioned terms, heavily addicted on this drug.

The question of smoking inhibiting your health,

it doesn't worry a person of my age when I have some years to live.

80% of smokers take up the habit before they're 19.

At that point the evidence shows that they don't fully understand

the risks, they don't fully understand the level of addiction.

There's a number of issues involved that, first of all,

you're saying this is a free choice that I have made,

fully informed about the risks,

but actually the evidence suggests that those are myths,

propagated by the tobacco industry.

It isn't a free choice.

An ever-expanding tobacco industry was winning the battle against

health professionals and government bodies, recruiting hundreds

of new customers every day.

# I read the news today, oh boy... #

By the beginning of the Seventies,

a dense cloud of tobacco smoke had conquered all public spaces.

With very few exceptions, workplaces across Britain, pubs,

restaurants, planes and buses were now a haze of smoke.

Upstairs on buses when I was a kid, you went upstairs on a bus,

and you couldn't see anything.

A blue fug hung in the air. It was like being in a foxhole in Vietnam.

You couldn't see a thing. You were like, "Hello?"

You couldn't tell if your mates on the bus or not

because there was a thick pall of blue smoke up there.

And after a while I thought, it's a bit smoky in here,

could you open the window?

You'd pull his window down.

I did this a couple of times, and it didn't go down well,

so I wound it down and all the wind would come in, the smoke

went straight to the back of the bus and they would all be coughing.

"Whose idea was that?" This is what they used to do.

# Made the bus in seconds flat

# Found my way upstairs and had a smoke

# Then somebody spoke and I went into a dream. #

The songs of the day reflect that. The Beatles are a case in point.

In A Day In The Life, they talk about going upstairs

and having a smoke and going into a dream.

There's an implication it could be about dope,

but I don't think it is.

They're talking about what lots of blokes, and women, did.

You went upstairs and it was five minutes to yourself.

You had a cigarette, looked out the window

and daydreamed as the cigarette smoke went up.

When jet planes came in the Fifties, people smoked on them.

They had bars on them, on the big planes.

You could stand up and go to the bar and you could smoke at the bar

and smoke cigars and stuff,

and the whole plane looked like one giant cigar tube.

It was full of smoke.

Eventually they moved it all to the back of the plane,

so you could smoke near the toilets, so you could disguise

the smell of the toilets after a few hours of the flight.

Which is crazy. It was ridiculous, really.

Some pubs were so full of smoke, you walk through the door

and you could cut the smoke with a knife.

And pass it and take it out with you, because you couldn't see the bar.

I had been in some pubs where you could barely see the bar,

and all the ceilings in all the old pubs were yellow.

The roofs of pubs were stained

that horrible catarrhal, jaundiced yellow.

The smell used to get everywhere.

It used to get in your clothes, in the carpet.

There were times you thought, it's a bit too much.

I'd be in pubs and walk out and think it was ridiculous,

because I don't even need to light a cigarette,

I just need to breathe in and save a fortune.

If you smoked, you smoke anywhere and everywhere that you chose

and nobody challenged you.

You could light up in buses, on trains, in the Tube,

there was one cinema where they asked you not to smoke.

One cinema.

That is extraordinary to think, even in the late-Seventies,

there was only one place you could go and not be kippered all night long.

People didn't even ask, "Do you mind if I smoke?"

The clouds of smoke advanced unchallenged,

becoming so ever-present

that public perception about smoking numbers was inflated.

While people believed that most of the nation smoked

the reality showed that only half did.

But this was about to change as more and more smokers transformed

themselves into a growing sub-species, the non-smoker.

I went six years smoking, and it was two things that really,

really made the difference and made me want to give up smoking.

One was I went to America to visit my sister

and I got a tap on the shoulder in a Greyhound bus station by a man

who said, "Excuse me, your smoking is damaging my health."

I put it out, I did, I went out and I took heed.

When I got back from America, I met a very fit bloke

in both senses of the word, he was fit, but he was also very fit.

He played squash and he hated the smell of smoke, and actually,

I've said this many times, but snogging that guy

without the smoke was absolutely worth a tonne of cigarettes.

It was love that got me to give up.

In the 1980s, Cecilia went on to become a health education officer,

taking an early interest in smokers.

Their first line of attack was the smoking restaurants of Bristol,

canvassing diners if they were in favour of creating non-smoking areas.

What would your reaction be

if someone at another table asked you not to smoke?

I should have regard for their wishes and stop smoking.

We have to mobilise non-smokers to be more militant about being

a non-smoker, and I think that in this way we can turn around

this state of affairs where smoking is the norm, which it shouldn't be.

Non-smoking areas of restaurants were thought of as a bit wussy.

"What do you mean? They need their own bit?"

Just get with the party, everybody smoke!

It kills any other aroma in the room.

If you're going to smoke, stay at home, smoke and have beans on toast.

But don't go to a restaurant, it's pointless.

I saw a guy eating a food,

sipping gin and smoking a cigarette at the same time.

I can't imagine what kind of a mind he had.

It's still sticks in my mind, this one couple

where the husband was smoking, the wife wasn't smoking.

The husband said, "Oh no, I like smoking,

people should be free to smoke anywhere."

The wife said, "Actually, yes, I do mind."

And the husband looked absolutely shocked at his wife and said,

"Well, you never said that before."

She said, "You never asked me!"

-Good idea.

-No smoking at all.

It's unpleasant for people about them.

She just stands there waving her hands around a lot.

I could embarrass everybody that I'm with.

The news after we published our research to find that 80%

of people that we questioned were in favour of smoking

and non-smoking areas. 80%!

It was the most shocking revelation,

that all of a sudden people who'd sat there not saying anything,

when they were asked, they stood up and said,

"Yes, I do mind if people smoke!"

So there was a shift as a result of this small survey.

In five eating places,

three of the five introduced smoke-free sections.

Absolutely the next day. There were so bowled over by the results we had.

But nobody had ever asked the non-smokers.

The smoker could no longer be sure of its habitat.

Once a small cell of activists had their scent,

the smoker would be herded into a new ecosystem for the first time.

The designated smoking area, where they would be easily identified.

But they had allies in the unlikeliest of places.

Within two or three years of starting my activism, we had the chairman

of the health authority come along to the Health Education Department.

We'd never had a visit from the chairman in our life.

And he came in and said, "I want you to stop all this smoking activity."

Bristol depends on its wealth for the tobacco industry,

and I want you to stop it.

You can go into schools, that's all right.

Give your talks in schools,

but I want you to stop all this activism.

Exactly that, it was the stuff that was hitting home.

I said to him, "I think you're in the wrong job, mate,

"if you think more of the wealth of the tobacco industry

"than the health of the people you're paid to actually care for."

And he said, "You'll regret that, woman."

He did! He slammed shut his case and walked out.

I thought, "I'm for the chop", but I did say,

"You can't stop me doing it in my own time."

# Something special happened today

# I got green lights all the way

# With no big red sign to stop me... #

The New Inn has achieved notoriety by becoming

the only non-smoking public house in the British Isles.

You can drink yourself to death here if you like,

but you wouldn't dare to light up.

Landlord John Showers makes it perfectly plain

that smoking in here is banned.

# Floating high into the darkness

# I hope I get there soon

# There's so many things to do... #

Today has been National No-Smoking Day,

hard on the heels of the Chancellor's attack on cigarettes in the Budget.

So, London Transport have just announced a permanent

and total ban on smoking in all trains on the London Underground,

and are to strengthen rules about no smoking areas on buses too.

Just two weeks before a smoking ban comes into place,

smokers there are being asked not to light up in their own homes

if they're expecting a visit from the council.

I refuse to use the expression "dying breed".

Endangered species.

You realise through the years

that you are in a minority in any situation.

You may find it an affront to your civil liberties,

you may find it the perfect opportunity to give up.

The ban on smoking in public in England comes into force this Sunday

and we've been sparing a thought for those poor tobacco companies,

yes, the one who depend on our addiction for their living.

People are often very nice and accommodating if you say,

"Can I, er...?" "Sure, sure."

But you are the odd one out in any physical set-up.

We've only got a couple of days

before England goes smoke-free on Sunday.

Anywhere you go, you are "the smoker", the token smoker.

And you really notice this after a while.

Tomorrow marks a year

since the smoking ban was introduced in England,

and it looks like it's had a real impact.

400,000 smokers gave up the habit within the first nine months

after the ban, and, as Catherine Marston reports,

it's predicted that as many as 40,000 smoking-related deaths

could be prevented over the next decade.

We've become so de-tuned to it now, so sensitised, rather, to it,

that if you go into a room...

If I check into a hotel room, which are not supposed to,

and I think, "Someone's been smoking in here",

you ring down to reception straightaway.

God, someone's been smoking in here! Can you get me another room?

The simple difficulties now associated with smoking

as a leisure activity and as a pastime, you can't

smoke in most buildings, you can't smoke at football matches,

you can't smoke in pubs, you can't smoke in restaurants.

I would think, more than anything else,

it's those sheer practicalities in that, there comes a point when

all your mates are sat round in the pub

and you have to stand at the back in the pouring rain to have a fag.

And you think, "Know what? Shall I not do this any more?"

You can't go into anyone's house.

Smoking in someone's house now,

it would be like shooting up in someone's house.

If you went into any English person's house

and took out a fag and lit up, can you imagine?

It would be like, "My God, what do you think you're doing?"

Everyone's got the right to go to hell in their own way,

but it seems now that that process has gone

from the sort of thing that the Archbishop of Canterbury did

and the Queen did, to something that is so kind of wretched,

and people have to apologise for.

# Something special happened today. #

The Smoker.

A breed for so long favoured

and catered to by society is now being hounded.

Forbidden to display the traits for which it was celebrated,

as the singular animal amongst the herd,

the smoker today is a diminished, anguished, exhausted creature.

A culture once shockingly in love with the American Leaf

is fading away.

It's lost aroma too nostalgic for some,

too acrid for most.

Profitable for the few.

The smoker is a truly endangered species.

Yet it seems to be accepting its fate to live in a smoke-free world.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

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