The number of adult tobacco users has dropped steadily in recent years, the World Health Organization said on Tuesday, but it warned Big Tobacco is working hard to reverse that trend.
In 2022, about one-in-five adults around the world were smokers or consumed other tobacco products, compared to one-in-every-three in 2000, the United Nations health agency said.
A fresh report looking at trends in the prevalence of tobacco use between 2000 and 2030 showed that 150 countries were successfully reducing it, the WHO said.
On the other hand, there are a lot of period pieces set in the 20th century where no one is smoking. I remember people smoking like chimneys back in the 1980s. You could smoke everywhere. You could smoke on airplanes. There were smoking sections in restaurants. There were smoking and non-smoking hotel rooms. A shit ton of people smoked.
So a modern show with people smoking, yeah, that’s not the best idea… but a show taking place in 1960 and nobody’s smoking? That’s ridiculous. And yet I keep seeing movies like that. Smoking is bad, but so is erasing it from history.
If I had to guess, a period show or movie likely doesn’t have smoking in it unless it’s essential to the plot because of the health risks as well as the pain of editing it in post. I know that there are herbal cigarettes that actors can smoke that are not as risky but unless it’s crucial to the shot, I can see directors just not even thinking of it.
Chekhov’s cigarette if you will.
Maybe so, but I always notice it and it takes me out of the story. It won’t bother younger people who don’t know it was like that, but (for example) the show Umbrella Academy had a season where they went back to the 1960s and no one was smoking. It was ridiculous and it was harder for me to suspend my disbelief.
It also gives people a skewed, sanitized view of history.
Absolutely agreed. A similar problem I have is female characters who are extremely liberated women for the time they’re in and, rather than literally every man telling her to shut up and know their place (or maybe even try to hit her), everyone accepts this. It’s nonsense. We need to show how women were treated.
There was a fun short-lived animated sketch comedy show in the early 2000s called “Ahh! It’s the Mr. Hell Show!” There was a sketch called ‘Victorian Lady Detective’ about a female detective who could never solve the crime either because men wouldn’t let her or sometimes the sexist law wouldn’t let her either. It always ended with her giving up and saying something like, “oh well, it’s the Victorian era and I’m a woman.” Exactly.
I’m sorry feminism didn’t exist before 20th century, but it just didn’t. There were a very small number of liberated women and very few of them got away with it for long.
The Canadian show Murdoch Mysteries is a perfect example of that. Set in 1900. They have a female morgue doctor that is free to do what she wants like accuse people of murder and such. Then they had her go to be a Psychiatrist at a mental hospital and another female doctor took over at the morgue. Like female doctors were rare but they seem to have two in the same city at the same time.
Copious amounts of ethnicities also break the immersion for me. I’m 100% for modern inclusion, but if you’re showing 17th century England and every other character is black or Asian, you pretty much have to be willfully ignoring history. That’s not even getting into how others interact with the character, just the fact that those ethnicities would be rare in those times and locations.
I agree. Doctor Who recently had a South Asian actor play Isaac Newton. Please do all the diversity you want when it makes sense (I was fine with Death being black in the Sandman series even though people seemed to hate it), but that was just weird and didn’t work.
Fun fact, there are still hotels you can book at that have smoking rooms.