Channel 4 last night celebrated England’s becoming a smoke free zone with a documentary that, after much research, concluded that we used to smoke a lot and now smoke less. In search of an argument to tart up this observation, Memoirs of a Cigarette came up with the theory that the planet’s tobacco addiction was the fault of Hollywood for glamorising nicotine abuse. It was, the documentary argued, only when the movies and the soaps and sitcoms turned on tobacco that humankind threw away its cancer sticks and walked free.

As an example of media solipsism this thesis could hardly be bettered. As an example of a misunderstanding of cause and effect it was even more precious. Of course, the movies did not turn people into smokers; they showed people smoking because smoking is what people did.

What the programme’s appropriately named director (my apologies to Andy Baybutt) needed was a smoking gun (and my apologies to you for that): namely, evidence that the tobacco companies had paid to place cigarettes between the fingers of Bette Davis and Lauren Bacall, two of Hollywood’s army of literally smouldering female stars.

Instead interviewee after interviewee explained the actual reasons that actors lit up. For one thing, it gave them something to do with their hands. For another, as Jimmy Savile explained, a cigar makes you look richer than you are. Most importantly, the etiquette of cigarette lighting and smoke blowing adding to an actor’s stock cupboard of flirtatious business. The ignition of two cigarettes in a male mouth, one for him, one for her, was, as Joan Bakewell said, “a referred kiss”.

In the end, however, as a sexual prop, the fag turned to ashes. In a well-selected clip, Carrie, on Sex and the City, lit up and was told chillingly by her beau that he could not date a smoker. Patsy in Ab Fab was a slut less because of the number of men she shagged than for the number of cigarettes she smoked. Women got the message that only slags smoked fags. But by then the scientific evidence of the effects of “passive smoking” and the death of the nonsmoker Roy Castle from lung cancer had turned smoking from a private vice into a public crime for everyone. A cigarette in your hand identified you as a fool, a villain, or a member of the underclass. You were also one of Castle’s assassins.

Bakewell, the late Bernard Manning, Vic Reeves, Will Self and, most effectively, Charlotte Rampling, argued for smoking on aesthetic grounds. How much more fun the programme would have been had Channel 4 had the nerve to broadcast an all-out defence of the killer weed. Instead smokers could be consoled with Self’s prediction that in 100 years there might well be a cigarette revival. This, at least, would vindicate Gerry Anderson, whose puppets, groovy inhabitants of the otherwise sussed 2060s, invariably smoked. For even the most ardent Thunderbirds fan, watching Scott and Virgil waving cigarettes about in their wobbly arms is today as shocking as those snaps of 60-a-day laboratory beagles.

Despite everything, Mitch Moore, the hard-to-like hero of Talk to Me (Sun, ITV1), was still smoking even as he dramatically resigned on air from his late-night problem phone-in at the climax of the serial’s final episode. Mitch was Jeremy Kyle remixed into something sexually attractive. As with Kyle, his job was to solve problems, but all Mitch did was screw things up further for everyone. After the triumph of sleeping with his best friend’s wife and ending her marriage, he recommended that a schoolboy caller purge his crush for his schoolteacher by sleeping with her. Was Mitch’s face red when the front page of the Evening Standard revealed this teacher was his own sister and the boy actually had?

After three weeks of almost entirely stagnant plotting – character wrestles with committing adultery, succumbs to the temptation, regrets it, but commits adultery again – last night’s conclusion finally stirred things up. As when a rotary blade is applied to a swamp, things got messy. Never mind, characters such as the teacher’s husband Scott and the flaky bint Ally became ever so slightly rounded. The nebulous relationship between Mitch’s drippy lover Claire and her obtuse, reluctant yet jealous husband Woody began to make some psychological sense. We therefore began to care. Only Mitch, played by the unpredictable Max Beesley – so brilliant in Bodies, so rubbish in Hotel Babylon – remained entirely unbelievable, an anguished sociopath and thus a walking oxymoron.

Out of the box

Apologies for my non appearance here in June. I caught pneumonia. (Fully recovered, thanks.) The doc predictably asked if I smoked. That I never have would presumably surprise the makers of Memoirs of a Cigarette for as a child I was exposed to hundreds of hours of nicotine-stained 1960s TV. All I developed, however, was a liking for “sweet cigarettes”, anaemic sticks of sugar branded not as Rothmans and Players but Dixon of Dock Green, The Man from Uncle, Supercar and, most shamingly, Huckleberry Hound Hound, Andy Pandy and Sooty.

The Shield has returned to Five. Once cynically slick, it’s become gritty, convincing and a bit weird. Maniac cop Vic is, for instance, now a dad – burden enough for a kid, but on Friday we learnt the lad is probably autistic.

andrew.billen@thetimes.co.uk

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