TV Eye: Burning time and money away

Photo / Peter Meecham

I'm not sure what the point of Dying for a Smoke was. By which I mean I'm not sure what the point of the documentary (last night, Inside NZ, TV3) was, other than to tell me - and presumably every other fagger still alive - that smoking is bad for you and that if you do it, you are, probably, dying for the sake of a smoke.

So I already knew all of that. I also know that it's ridiculously expensive and that if I added up how much I've spent on fags over the years I'd want to kill myself, thus saving the fags the trouble.

Also it pongs up your house and you look like a loser when you sit outside in a hoar frost because nobody else will let you pong up their house.

I did, possibly, learn one thing. It's Captain Cook's fault that Maori smoke. The first white man to walk on these shores came ashore fagging, apparently. Maori thought he was on fire so they kindly threw water over him to put him out. Actually, apparently, they thought he was a demon and so threw water over him. This made me laugh so much (well, wheeze, actually, after 30 years of fags) that for the first and last time I wished for one of those terrible
re-enactments documentary makers are so fond of.

Anyway, having water chucked over him presumably didn't put the captain off the smokes.

Nothing much puts committed smokers off the smokes. We like them, you see. And we hate them. It's a very complicated relationship. Smokes are friends; they just happen to be rotten friends - but who else is going to sit outside with you in a hoar frost?

We met Phil and Maureen, life-long smokers. Phil had had, three months earlier, most of a lung removed as part of his treatment for lung cancer. He had this lung in a plastic bag (we could have done with a better look at it because, ew, yuck, that'd put you off your tucker, perhaps even your fags.) Maureen and he both gave up after the operation, but she was back smoking. She said: "You feel really lonely. You want to say, 'hey, what about me?' You're
not the one who's got the cancer but you can have all the same pain and grief."

I suspect this makes no sense whatsoever to non-smokers; it made absolute sense to me.

We met Tracy and her husband and some of their 11 kids. Of the 11, 10 smoke. The only reason the 11th doesn't smoke is that she's only 10. The family gave up. We were told, in the closing credits, that after three months, they took it up again.

Well, thanks a lot. That, more than anything else, made me want to give up giving up and go outside into the frost and light up.

Smoking is boring. Giving up is boring. Watching people bang on about smoking and giving up is boring. Watching tobacco industry weasels talk like weasels (smoking is legal, they say. They are providing a product to people who want it, they say - all of which is unassailable and if they ban fags I may well be contrary enough to start growing my own tobacco and start fagging again).

So, yes, Dying for a Smoke was very worthy but, like its subject matter, it was as boring as spending all those years smoking. And it was the boredom of it that has made me give up - not lungs in plastic bags and earnest health workers and statistics or that poor addict, Captain Cook, bringing the fags here in the first place.

- TimeOut