Why encourage smoking then?
Dr Francis Kellerman, to whom for his vigorous and successful advice to stop smok- ing I personally am enormously indebted, wrote in these pages last January pointing out that doctors smoke in hosptials under 'No Smoking' signs, that professors officially lec- turing smoke before their pupils, and particularly that "'television personalities" who are subjects of hero-worship and presumably are selected by virtue of their intelligence, expert knowledge and social conscience, to discuss matters of some im- portance to the community (or are being interviewed) smoke in front of millions of viewers'. The other day I wondered, talking to a television producer, that cigarette smok- ing should be permitted and often en- couraged on the screen, and he replied that clouds of smoke swirling around someone talking enormously improved the picture. If television is as genuinely interested in reducing disease as the apologists for the sensational treatment of the VD pictures will doubtless insist, then presumably these same apologists will see to it that smoking is ban- ned on This Week in future. If not, sceptics may properly conclude that the producers of This Week are more interested in sensational shots of diseased penises and views of publicists wreathed in smoke, than they are in discouraging syphilis or lung cancer.
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