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WARNER: Why pretend the past was cigarette-free?  

Send for the Sanity Inspector - quickly. There is work for him among the denizens of Liverpool city council. The council is proposing to use its powers to upgrade to an 18-certificate the classification of films "if they depict images of tobacco smoking", in order to protect the vulnerable youth of Merseyside from exposure to such depravity. . . .

Accepting the axiom that what Liverpool city council proposes today, the world implements tomorrow, we must come to terms with the prospect that this is just the beginning of a new age in cinema. For political correctness is never a static force; it seeks always to break new ground. Assuming young cinema-goers are successfully kept from exposure to smoking, the next logical step would be to extend this protection to over-18s as well.

Tentative moves have already been made towards a more broad-based censorship. In Paris, the cigarette was removed from a picture of Jean-Paul Sartre on a poster from an exhibition. Sartre, when asked what was the most important thing in his life, replied: "I don't know. Everything. Living. Smoking." Posthumously, he has managed to give up the latter. In a more directly Liverpudlian context, Paul McCartney's cigarette was excised on US posters of the cover of Abbey Road.

The really exciting thing about such initiatives is that they represent the first, cautious moves towards rewriting history - towards creating an alternative past that is more palatable to the promoters of political correctness To some extent, things are already moving that way, for example when we hear a powdered 18th-century aristocrat in a television period drama referring to "the under-privileged". Such anachronisms are attributable to the increasing historical illiteracy of scriptwriters; but why not harness ignorance to progress?

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