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To censor pictures of the famous holding cigarettes betrays a curious idea of what makes people smoke
Jump to full article: The Guardian (uk), 2009-09-18
Author: Mark Lawson | Comment is free
Intro: A quiz question: what is the link between ex-President Jacques Chirac, the composer Rachmaninov and interviewer Lynn Barber? If this were a picture round, you'd get it immediately, from the little angled strip of white on their hand. The answer is that attempts have been made to ban photographs of them on the grounds that they were shown smoking.
The publication of Chirac's latest volume of memoirs has mysteriously been delayed, allegedly because of concerns over a dustjacket image which shows him having a puff. . . .
Apart from the authorities in Richmond, Britain seems more relaxed on this issue than the US or France. The cover of Professor John Carey's biography of William Golding shows the author of the Lord of the Flies indulging in a practice now almost as frowned upon as torturing small boys on desert islands.
It would have been difficult, though, for the publisher's picture researchers to avoid depicting the author in the grip of the solitary vice because, until around the 1990s, writers were as likely to have a cloud of smoke above their heads as saints to wear a halo on holy icons. This seems to have been particularly the case with dramatists. My shelves of play-texts show Pinter, Stoppard, Osborne, Coward, Rattigan and Tennessee Williams all dripping ash above their desks. A Martian looking at these books might conclude that scripts were written with a special burning stick.
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