BOGIE puffed on The African Queen, Eastwood chewed his cheroot through all those spaghetti westerns, and even Gandalf the Wizard lights up his pipe in The Lord of the Rings. The recent film about Ed Murrow and Senator Joe Macarthy, Goodnight, and Good Luck, set in the Fifties, was shot in a positive fug of cigarette smoke.

Now a far more politically incorrect cinematic moment has been brought to the attention of Ofcom, the broadcasting watchdog: Tom has been smoking in front of Jerry.

People with no sense of humour occasionally complain at the violence on the classic Hanna-Barbera cat-and-mouse cartoon series, which has delighted children of all ages since the 1940s.

Feline tobacco use was spotted by a viewer in two Tom and Jerry episodes shown regularly on Boomerang, a children’s cartoon channel owned by Ted Turner’s CNN organisation.

The offending cartoons are Tennis Chumps and Texas Tom. In the former, Tom’s opponent in a match is seen drawing on a large cigar. In the latter, Tom tries to impress a female cat by rolling a cigarette, lighting it and smoking it, all with one hand. It is a skill which, in this country at least, sometimes raises suspicions that the performer picked up the trick while behind bars.

After the complaint Turner conducted a review of its Tom and Jerry library to assess any smoking scenes and the context in which they appear.

Cecilia Persson, a vice-president of Turner Broadcasting, said yesterday that it had “a responsibility to create a safe place for kids to watch TV”.

The channel had edited out two scenes where smoking could be deemed to be glamorised, and would review its library of cartoons to remove any other glamorising references to smoking. Turner has told OfCom, however, that removing all scenes of smoking in cartoons “might adversely affect the value of the animation”.

Ofcom’s broadcast code states that smoking must not be featured in programmes made primarily for children unless there is strong editorial justification, and it must not be condoned, encouraged or glamorised before the watershed.

The watchdog acknowledged that most Tom and Jerry cartoons were made in an era when smoking was acceptable, and it usually appeared “in a stylised manner and is frequently not condoned”.

A spokesman for the BBC said that whatever happened to Tom and Jerry would also apply to that most habitual of all cartoon smokers, Popeye, who is rarely seen without his trademark corncob pipe.

“I yam what I yam what I yam,” said Popeye. Ah, you haven’t met Ofcom, then?

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