Up in Smoke

One of the incidental pleasures of watching streaming channels like B-Movie TV and American Horrors is that they tend to show old adverts from around the world between programmes.  American Horrors, in particular, screens a lot of vintage cigarette commercials, including this one from the UK for John Player Special cigarettes.  This one dates from 1972, when cigarette advertising had been banned from TV for some time, but still persisted in cinemas.  It is pretty much typical of its type, trying to position its product as some kind of luxury lifestyle item.  All of the 'upmarket' cigarette brands like JPS or Benson and Hedges tried this tactic in a clear attempt to move their products away from the increasing evidence of the harm they could do to their users' health.  After all, nobody wants to be reminded that what they are smoking might fill their lungs with tar, fur up their arteries and possibly give them respiratory problems and/or cancer.  They'd much rather maintain the fictio that they are a mark of sophistication and class.

It is notable that that cheaper cigarette brands like Woodbines, for instance, never got this treatment.  Presumably on the basis that they were so rough that the type of person prepared to smoke them didn't care what they might be doing to their body.  It is remarkable the amount of creativity that went into many of these campaigns - all to sell something that you inhaled into your lungs at your own peril.  Interestingly, later campaigns would even avoid promoting the idea that these were something you smoked, not featuring anyone actually engaged in smoking and sometimes not even showing the actual product itself, like this Hugh Hudson directed Benson and Hedges cinema ad, which focuses entirely upon the packaging:

The cigarette carton as archeological artifact, a source of wonder to the masses.  Which, ironically, is what cigarettes are becoming as their usage declines.  Indeed, nowadays they are even denied their colourful packaging, truly making that Benson and Hedges carton a museum piece.  Of course, while cigarette advertising might have been banned from British TV, the tobacco companies still maintained a strong presence through sports sponsorship: I vividly remember the black painted JPS Formula One cars, for instance, bringing the brand into millions of homes in the days when Formula One was still shown on BBC2.  Still, it is all a thing of the past now, with the adverts a relic of a strange era when people filled their lungs with smoke in an attempt to look sophisticated, (according to the ads, at least).