by John Roberts

Created on: May 20, 2007   Last Updated: June 16, 2007

THIS column is rated MA 15+. Children under 15 must be accompanied by a parent or adult guardian. It contains elements of pervasive cigarette smoking.
Remember the Marlboro man, and Paul Hogan exhorting us to 'Anyhow, have a Winfield''? Remember how Peter Stuyvesant was your passport to international smoking pleasure, and nothing was as fresh as Alpine?
Well, if you're of my vintage, you'd certainly recall that before the main feature at a cinema, instead of advertisements warning us about video piracy and reminding us to turn off our mobile phones, the screen would instead be dancing with images of the beautiful people inhaling deep lungfuls of rich Virginia tobacco smoke.

Back then certainly at the suburban fleapits that I used to frequent with their canvas chairs, bare timber floors and $3 admission - the air of the cinema itself would be thick with a miasma of cigarette smoke.
Vale the good old days.
Gone is any form of tobacco advertising. Smoking in a cinema in fact indoors anywhere except your own home is long dead. In fact light up within 4 metres of a cinema entrance and you're liable for a $150 fine.
Now it also looks like merely depicting in a feature film on the silver screen what roughly a quarter of the adult population still chooses to do and that is smoke - has a very limited life expectancy.
The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) which is responsible for censorship classifications in the US - has decided to apply tough new guidelines for films that depict smoking.
Under the new rules, censors would be required to consider whether a film glamorises smoking, and whether smoking is 'pervasive'' and if so slap a harsher classification on the picture.
Australia of course, is to follow suit.
AttorneyGeneral Philip Ruddock said last week that Australian film censors are 'already required to take drug use into consideration as one of the classifiable elements when looking at any product this can include depictions of smoking."
Ruddock insisted he wanted to "ensure that the board is taking smoking into account when classifying films and computer games".
So, does this mean Humphrey Bogart's ever-present cigarette in Casablanca, or Sean Connery announcing himself as 'Bond, James Bond'' from behind a cloud of smoke will earn these films a stricter classification, or will they slip through the net on the basis of 'historical context''?
For roughly a quarter of the population smoking is a part of life as natural as having a cup of coffee in the morning or a

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