Smoking

March 18, 2025·28 min·2 clips

Ivan Markovich analyzes how a single cigarette transforms a tense six-minute argument between Bette Davis and Paul Henreid in the 1942 film 'Now, Voyager'.

The programme begins with cigarette ends. A T.S. Eliot line opens into social memory, with childhood packets leading into the meanings smoking carried: social, cultural, and emotional. Then a cinema exchange gives the argument some bite. Asked whether a smoking ban would keep him away, one cinema goer says cigarettes belonged with the pictures. The host does not treat that as quaint. He places it in time, noting that passive smoking harms were understood much later, before bans came to enclosed public spaces. The pub becomes the test case. Ivan calls it the smoker's last refuge, a place where atmosphere and smoke could feel almost welded together. Some people really did feel a loss. Letters and diaries from just after the ban suggest a fear that pubness itself might go with the haze. Still, the episode does not get misty about it. Smoking did not disappear. It moved outside, into shelters, pavement groups, ash, cigarette ends, and the overspill of pub life. The street picked up what the pub pushed out. An indoor custom became a boundary habit, part social life and part exclusion from the clearer room inside. Non-smokers are part of it too. Ivan says many smokers and non-smokers welcomed the change, especially once smoke stopped covering every other smell. The room was not simply cleaned up. It was rearranged. Pleasure, nuisance, memory, and public health all had to share the same story. Even dry cleaners felt it. A BBC report makes the change plain: people could leave pubs without smoke in their clothes and hair. The episode works because it keeps its head. It asks what vanishes when a ban works, without turning the old fug into a golden age.

As heard by us

A sharp social history of smoking, pubs, bans, and the changing smell of public life.

Smoking treats cigarettes less as a private vice than as a social habit that changed the feel of public life. Laurie Taylor opens with Eliot, childhood cigarette brands, and the flat comedy of the "vapid vape," then turns to cinemas, pubs, passive smoking, and the bans on…

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