The noxious weed

Alistair reflects on the tobacco industry's response to a ban on cigarette advertising on TV and radio. This Letter was originally broadcast in January 1971 and repeated on BBC Radio 4 on Friday, 4 June, 2004.

Some studious type on the radio thought to greet the New Year by reciting Tennyson's Ring Out, Wild Bells but on television the New Year was rung in with the wildest, certainly the most expensive, burst of cigarette advertising since Sir Walter Raleigh returned from Virginia and started up the unending debate about tobacco: whether, as Raleigh thought, it was a delicious medicine with a most soothing effect on the nerves or whether, as King James I insisted - to the point of hysteria in his famous pamphlet A Counterblaste to Tobacco - it was a "moste abominable and noxious weede".

Anyway, as you may have heard, cigarette advertising on television and radio was banned by act of Congress, beginning not on January 1st but January 2nd - there's a very important difference here.

In some countries New Year's Day is given over to recovering from New Year's Eve and also to the making of resolutions, like giving up smoking.

In the United States New Year's Day is a national holiday given over entirely to the last orgy of championship football before we retire to our caves to sit out the winter snows and the zero temperatures.

Forty years ago big-time football was college football. All the movies and musical comedies about football were about a keen, young stripling giving his all for old Winsockie and for his girlfriend - the clean young soprano in the stands.

Today college football excites the great public about as much as college baseball.

The big time is professional football and the stars are rangy, young gorillas who will give their all - for four or five years - to achieve the ambition of any self-respecting sportsman today, which is to make, first, a million dollars and, a little later on, to emulate the two most famous living golfers - Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus - and buy their own private jet.

I'd better say that no American institution I can think of is worse understood abroad than American football.

British sportsmen who know their way around a rugby field, a billiard table and even chess board, succumb without a second thought to the facetious view of American football as a mindless bout of mayhem between brutes got up in spacemen outfits.

But it would not take more than a couple of weeks of careful instruction from a coach or a knowledgeable fan to realise that American football is an open-air chess game, disguised as armoured warfare.

It is the most scientific of all outdoor games. There is a lexicon of plays, known to any decent footballer as premeditated as the plays in chess, the Ruy Lopez opening, the Petroff Defence, the Sicilian Defence, the Queen's Gambit Declined.

And most of these plays are learned for the purpose not only of using them but of declining them on the spur of the moment.

Hence the extraordinary and, to the foreigner, bewildering sight of men running off in circles and tangents with no apparent relation to the ball or the man who's holding it.

For weeks before a big game the players practise these plays and feints and fake plays, and in the evenings they attend sessions of instruction in strategy and tactics, following hieroglyphics on a blackboard which, when once they were shown before a Princeton game to Albert Einstein, baffled him completely.

However footballers never forget that they are engaged in warfare and that the switch from planned to impromptu tactics requires them to break, twist, crash or swerve on a signal from a man 30 yards away or from a map of the game inside their heads.

And they do seem to suffer more than most athletes from characteristic and innumerable injuries - as much as baseball players, who also are required to practise hairsbreadth plunges and turns that in cricket, for instance, would be mad and dangerous improvisations.

The dazzling standard of fielding in baseball is not due to any native physical superiority of baseball players over cricketers.

A fielder practises down in Florida for half the winter, timing his run to a ball to catch it on the bounce and return it with a single reflex.

And when a runner literally dives full length into third base he's not being desperately brave, he's doing something he's expected to do after hundreds of rehearsals on Florida's hot, dry ground.

Consequently while football and baseball may be recommended by muscular persons as splendid ways to build up health and strength of character, they also tend to produce dislocated elbows, chronic trouble with the kneecap or damage to the spur of the heel.

Top golfers of course - because they must regularly perform the lethal movement of pivoting around a braced spine - are frequently laid low with muscle spasms, disintegrated discs and bursitis.

Somebody said Arnold Palmer would refuse to appear on the first tee without a bursa. And show me a top-notch footballer and I'll show you a top-notch collector of torn cartilages, bruised tendons, wobbly kneecaps, damaged shoulders.

The greatest living American football is a man named Joe Namath. To a stranger he appears to be lanky, loping, heavy-lidded, shaggy-haired young man, who throws a long ball in any direction his fancy suggests.

But I gather he's a tactician unrivalled since Napoleon or Alexander the Great.

He is, however, not expected to be out on the field for more than another season or two.

Why? His knees have been operated on three times. They're braced and bandaged before every game and at the end he staggers off like an infantryman on the last lap of the retreat from Moscow.

But he is a wise sportsman of the late 20th Century. He has formed a syndicate - to make footballs, endorse cigarettes?

No, he is going to endorse - wait for it - pantyhose!

And he's going to start, also, a nightclub. He may yet come to rival the chain of fish and chip shops started in California by Arthur Treacher, the old English movie butler. Or the tea shops of Japan - Arnold Palmer Tea Shops.

So no one is more aware of the tribute the nation owes to its footballers, its supreme gladiators, than the cigarette manufacturers.

They knew that for about 12 hours on New Year's Day the living rooms of America would resound with the cheers of the crowds, the blare of the bands, the gabble of the commentators, the rise and fall of famous plays and occasionally with the smart crack of a breaking heel or a slipping kneecap.

There was probably a larger audience watching television than for anything so comparatively placid as a landing on the Moon.

The cigarette manufacturers consequently had a day and a night to get across their last inspirational message.

Once for all let every nation know that this brand is sweeter, better, milder, tastier. Than what? They never tell us.

Next day - the 2nd of January - you wouldn't have known that smoking had ever been discovered.

The silence fell like a great snow. But not before one tobacco firm had spent a million and a quarter dollars making one last heartrending pitch.

Next day they laid their plans to increase cigarette advertising on billboards, on buses, in papers, magazines and through the sponsoring of sports events.

During all this I expect the class has been thinking of the recent report of the Royal College of Physicians, which reinforces everything that's been said since the American Cancer Society got out its first and frightening report in 1954.

By now I think everybody, except people whose livelihood depends on the tobacco industry, agrees that the damaging evidence against cigarette smoking is overwhelming.

Even in America, where trade lobbies are so immensely powerful, the tobacco industry failed a year ago to stop Congress passing a law which requires the printing on every pack of cigarettes of a warning: "The Surgeon General has determined that cigarette smoking is dangerous to your health".

What I don't think is likely to happen here or even in England, where it's been proposed, is the banning not only of all cigarette advertising but the public prohibition of smoking.

However noble the impulse may be to save people from themselves, the Americans remember only too well the disasters that followed the noblest experiment of them all - the national prohibition of all alcoholic liquors, which within a year or two had every other 16 year old carrying a hip flask of bootlegged liquor, even if he or she was travelling only two blocks.

Once you start stamping health warnings on things that have harmed a lot of people I frankly don't know where you'd stop.

A helping of Christmas pudding could mean sudden death to a man with a high cholesterol count.

Should we have to trace in creamy white sauce on every plum pudding the warning "This pudding may be dangerous to your health"?

I was brought up in a city where black smog, not yet called smog, reduced visibility to about 75 yards on winter days. It was known as fresh air.

"Get out in the fresh air, lad. Don't sit there watching your father smoke!"

I've lately thought of suing the town council for poisoning my youth and stunting my growth.

If we start a campaign of wholesale, wholesome health warnings I don't see why every industrial town in the Western world shouldn't be compelled to erect public signs which say "Warning! Breathing our air may be hazardous to health".

Hazardous to health indeed!

As the man said, the mortality rate from breathing is 100%.