Hockney lights up Today
Tuesday, December 29, 2009 
Just finished listening to the Today programme, "guest edited" by David Hockney (pictured, left, with me at a Forest event in 2008). Having set my alarm for 6.00am I managed to conduct this important work whilst sitting in bed drinking coffee and eating a mince pie or two.
We were promised a programme that would address smokers' rights and, to be fair, smoking did feature prominently in a number of items. However, with the exception of a few words from Joe Jackson and a short interview with Hockney himself at the end of the programme, it was all a bit cosy.
What we got was a brief spin around Europe (well, Paris, Brussels and Berlin) where reporter Caroline Wyatt interviewed a Parisienne bar owner, a journalist, UKIP's Gawain Towler, a social commentator and Joe (who lives in Berlin but recorded his bit last week at BBC Radio Solent in Portsmouth!).
There was a brief discussion about the history of smoking with a social historian who spoke of the "unintended consequences" of the smoking ban - one of which is that the "cool crowd" is now outside smoking.
And there was a report from Cairo which was described as "smoking heaven" and a "smokers' nirvana".
Nevertheless this felt like a sanitised and, at times, rather patronising view of smokers' rights. There was little or no challenge, for example, to the status quo in the UK where smoking is now banned in every "public" building and there are plans for more legislation to restrict even further smokers' rights.
For once the likes of ASH, BMA et al didn't get a word in. But there was little sense of the anger and frustration felt by so many smokers on this blog and elsewhere. Nor was there any debate about issues such as secondhand smoke, or the impact on pubs and clubs and local communities as a result of the smoking ban.
Nor was there any attempt to explain the pleasure so many people get from smoking - a step too far, perhaps, for Today which (I thought) preferred to humour Hockney rather than take his message too seriously. (The sound of an avuncular David Blunkett responding to the claim that we are living in a more authoritarian age was particularly hard to bear.)
Beggars can't be choosers but I thought it was a lost opportunity to balance the BBC's usual hostility towards smokers and their habit.
Click HERE to listen to 'Europe's smoking attitudes' featuring (among others) Joe Jackson. Joe talks of Britain being "rather repressive" compared to Germany where smokers are "fighting back a bit". He also quotes Hockney: "You can't have a smoke-free bohemia".
Reader Comments (3)
It would be nice Simon if a contact address were available, so that we could point out to the programme makers that much of the debate they had did not go to the heart of the matter.
Perhaps a few disgruntled e-mails might just do the trick for next time.
Tom -
If you EVER get an intelligent response - in fact ANY response - from BBC programme-makers, do please share it with us.
I gave up a long time ago...............
I was quite surprised by the lack of anger coming from Joe Jackson who, when he writes, does so very passionately.
The interview with Blunkett was rather interesting, I thought, with his remark that authoritarianism is an issue that will be addressed in the run up to the GE (is NL going to try to defend it, suggest that the Tories will be even more so, LOL?)