Smoking out the truth
BURNING DESIRE: THE SEDUCTION OF SMOKING
BBC2, 9.30pm
IN the 1970s and 80s, Peter Taylor made documentaries about the tobacco industry and how it was in denial about the fact smoking was lethal.
Thirty years later, Taylor has returned to the same subject and what’s remarkable is that, despite all the efforts to control the industry (smoking bans, advertising controls, packaging and so on), little has changed. Millions of people are still smoking; billions are still being made in profit. It’s probably evidence there’s something about the cancer stick.
Taylor travels to Australia to look at the industry’s last-ditch battle to prevent plain packaging in which glossy images are replaced with gruesome health warnings – an attempt to ramp up the health warnings which other countries around the world are looking at.
What Taylor finds is that, for an industry under constant attack, the tobacco industry is in remarkable health. With profits of more than £30 billion, producing six trillion cigarettes a year, the industry would appear to be winning.
As part of his investigations, Taylor has been given rare and remarkable access to the second-largest tobacco company in the world, British American Tobacco. He talks to their executives and learns how BAT, now openly recognising that smoking kills, has set itself a new core strategy of what it calls harm reduction, developing a range of less harmful alternatives to conventional cigarettes.
The programme has all the rigour and anger of Taylor’s original documentaries in the 1970s and 80s, for which he was honoured with a Royal Television Society Lifetime Achievement Award for outstanding contribution to journalism earlier this year.
In those programmes, he revealed the denials, duplicity and dirty tricks of an industry that refused to acknowledge the truth about tobacco. In this programme, he asks the question: is there any likelihood of the burning desire ever being extinguished?