LET SMOKING DOGS LIE

Never mind the hoo-hah over the Scottish Elections.

About a year ago I reported on the smoking ban, soon to be foisted on the English. But what separates us from our Sassanach pals is that English actors, like their Irish counterparts, will still be allowed to smoke to their art’s content in film and on stage.

Yesterday’s Scotsman ran a piece on a film due to shoot in Scotland but now headed south of the border because its main character, real-life civils rights champion, Lord John Wolfenden smoked a pipe. Cue a bunch of loony comments from the readership – suggesting everything from CGI pipe smoking to how shampoo and furniture polish are killing us anyway – which means I should have dropped dead a long time ago. Hell, we all need to die of something – and without being too morbid about it most of us won’t die a glamourous death. To extend the smoking ban to film and telly just invites defiance, whether a filmmaker chooses to break the law and risk the penalty or to ignore reality and sacrifice authentic locations by shooting somewhere where they won’t be fined or arrested. Like they say, money talks – but money walks too – and in this case I don’t blame the filmmakers for going elsewhere.

Whoever ends up running this country would do us a big favour if they looked again at this mad legislation and allowed smoking on set where it can be justified. It’s not just about drawing room dramas and period autheniticity here. With a third of the adult population still merrily puffing away in Scotland, if there’s not a human rights issue at stake, there’s a cultural one – that folk who smoke deserve to be represented on screen and stage every bit as much as other minority groups.

And what happens when the big budget Hollywood drama arrives? Here it would help if Harry Potter enjoyed the odd Mayfair round the back of the broom cupboard because if that was the case I’m sure Alex Salmond would change the law as fast as you can say Abracadabra for fear of the prestige, the publicity and the multi-million dollar budget going up in smoke. When what passes for a film business here is already about as much use as an ashtray, we could use some help, before I (seriously) - and my fellow recent-ish graduate filmmakers - head elsewhere.

In the end it makes you think - who are they coming for next? How long before fat folk are fingered for eating on screen? Or anybody getting just a wee bit too tiddly? From there it’s but a short step to poor people being pilloried for shopping in Lidl and gays being put back in their box for, well, bad décor mostly and putting milk in first, so I wonder what any future law means for a girl like me for having a dirty mind (but clean underwear, if you must know).