How we have made the past a smoke-free zone

An interesting observation from Peter Bradshaw:

There is a strange new smoking-related trend in movies and television. I noticed it while watching The Theory of Everything, the excellent new film about Stephen Hawking, starring Eddie Redmayne. 

Then I noticed it watching That Day We Sang, the similarly excellent television play that was on over Christmas, written and directed by Victoria Wood, starring Imelda Staunton and Michael Ball about a poignant adult relationship in the late 1960s between two people who had sung together 40 years previously in a children’s choir. 

These period dramas showed people in pubs, restaurants, cafes and teashops. All the details and the superb production design were wonderfully clear. 

So where was the blue haze, the fug, the horrible brimming ashtrays and the nasty fag smoke? A lot of people would have been smoking in those places at that time: both the good guys and the bad guys. But we’ve cleaned them up – fictionally.