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. This matches the experience of Barber – who withdrew from the Richmond Literature Festival when objections were raised to the inclusion in the brochure of a publicity shot in which she palms a gasper – and, posthumously, of the Russian composer. When the pianist Stephen Hough chose to illustrate a recording with a snap of Rach toting an elegant cigarette holder at the keyboard, his US distributor asked for this dissonant health and safety note to be taken out. Hough huffed and won.
Three marks to anyone who got all the examples; no points for common-sense to any of the authorities involved. To avoid any misunderstanding, I say this as a lifelong anti-fag man who lectures smokers in my office like a temperance pledger standing at the door of a pub. But really, these stories are enough to make you want to go to the nearest newsagent and order a pack of each from the wall of death behind the counter.
The argument of the censorious forces in the above cases is that the shocking ciggy pics might encourage those seeing them to light up at home or outside the office door; could, in the terrible official lingo, "normalise" the activity.
Yet it seems quite unlikely that a keen reader in Surrey, flicking through a list of author talks in a pamphlet, is going to say, in the fragrant air of her innocently smokeless home: "That one with the lady who does those interviews looks interesting – oh God, darling, for some reason I suddenly fancy a fag." And the illustration of Chirac with sin at his lips is obviously historical; he stopped smoking in 1988. Rachmaninov, admittedly, is dead but reached the age of 70, reasonable for a Russian male of that period.
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.
And, as recently as this week, British newspapers risked "normalising" a high-fat, high-fag, high-booze diet. Reports of the death of Keith Floyd were embellished with snaps of him swigging red wine over a plate of roasted animal with a cigarette either in his hand or on the table. Beside these portraits – hard-core gastro-porn by modern standards – the text outlined his glorious last lunch, with helpful cutout menus of the dishes and drinks consumed.
This celebration of excess was possibly surprising given that, as the TV chef collapsed soon after this blowout, the meal might literally be said to have killed him and because, as on most days, the other pages of the editions memoralising Floyd were filled with warnings from medical researchers about how every snack and swig of certain substances might be our last. And, in another contradiction, accounts of the death on the same day of the film star Patrick Swayze, from pancreatic cancer, noted that "he was a heavy smoker and had been treated for alcoholism". Such lines are standard in articles about the celebrity departed and serve to "explain" the deaths.
Most deaths from illness, though, result from a combination of lifestyle, genes and luck, and celebrity role-models seem unlikely to play much of a part. There were reports of restraurants offering, as a special, "Keith Floyd's Final Meal", but most diners succumbing to this rather sick stunt are likely to have woken up next morning.
Similarly, repeated listening to Hough's cigarette-illustrated Rachmaninov CD has not made me a smoker, and readers of Chirac's reminiscences are as likely to become president as a result of the experience as to head to a tabac to match his dustjacket habit. What, you sometimes wonder, are these people on?
