Issue 166

If we
were inclined to believe advertisers, advertising is an
essential pillar of democracy. I actually heard it said
on the radio by somebody speaking for the advertising
industry. What constitutes an unessential pillar I’m
not sure, but I suppose it’s possible that it might
actually be advertising. On the surface of it, anything
less essential than advertising is hard to imagine.
There is a well-meaning experiment that’s currently
being undertaken in this country (surprisingly perhaps)
by the Forces for Good in relation to the sale of cigarettes.
Not only has the advertising of cigarettes been severely
restricted (although there are ways around embargos on
traditional advertising, like product placement for instance)
but cigarette packaging has been mandated to be generically
uniform and as graphically repulsive as possible in an
effort to remind smokers that every cigarette they smoke
takes them another step closer to a tobacco-related disease
and a consequently horrible death.
The experiment’s complicated by the simultaneous
impost of a government excise that brings tobacco into
price competition with illegal drugs like marijuana and
cocaine, (bringing us closer to the world envisaged by
my late wife Helen, who foresaw tobacco actually being
more expensive than illegal drugs), so it will never been
known which strategy actually works more effectively.
That’s if the combination of strategies actually
works at all. Despite the official pronouncements made
from time to time, tobacco still holds some romantic appeal
among the young and the appeal may even be greater now
because of tobacco’s growing association with illegal
drugs.
In Europe the general population sees government involvement
in reducing the sale of tobacco, well-intentioned or not,
as an infringement of personal liberty and hapless Australian
tourists have to get used to people blowing smoke in their
faces while eating in cafés and restaurants from
Paris to Athens.
The sensitivity to government intrusion into our lives
is not so pronounced in the antipodes where governments
are traditionally seen as bumbling but benign for the
most part, but a lot of smokers here feel the government
is guilty of being patronising at the very least.
Personally I think that smokers in the workplace should
be made aware by their peers that their skiving off to
have a fag every half hour is simply unacceptable and
that consideration for their workmates should take priority
over their drug habit. In other words, on the grounds
of common decency rather than just health and safety.

We tend to forget that smokers are just victims of the
well-practised blandishments of advertising. The nexus
between the tobacco industry and advertising has been
so profitable that Tobacco has been able..
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Having
just seen ‘Blade Runner 2047’ I am trying
to remember the first work that I read or saw that I would
describe as Science Fiction. Delving back into a far distant
and fugitive past there was the 1954 film of Jules Verne’s
‘20,000 Leagues under the sea’ with James
Mason and Kirk Douglas, although I would classify that
as Steam Science Fiction given its look and feel . Anything
with Kirk Douglas singing “A Whale of A tale”
has a lot to overcome and there were moments I was barracking
for the giant squid to do him in. I think that we also
had the View-Master stereoscope and corresponding “reels”
of the movie, those thin cardboard disks containing seven
stereoscopic 3-D pairs of small colour transparencies,
as well. Those are a bit of lost history if they existed
anywhere but in my memory.
Probably the greatest source of speculative news and anticipation
were the Film Annuals that we got every Christmas which
contained films that we would generally never see but
be as vivid as if we had. In New Zealand they knew all
the films that we might be able to see in the coming year
which showed how long it took for the movies to get to
the Antipodes . We knew all about dashing Richard Todd
and Glynis Johns in ‘Rob Roy; The Highland Rogue’
months, perhaps years, before it arrived even though I
never knew the film was actually in colour as all the
photographs in the book were in black and white.
What I didn’t know about Todd was that he was the
first choice of author Ian Fleming to play James Bond
in ‘Dr No’.
So there was Michael Rennie in ‘The Day the Earth
Stood Still’ as the alien Klaatu with his mighty
robot Gort beside his flying saucer near the Washington
Monument on Cold War-era Earth just after the end of World
War II. I didn’t see the movie until forty years
later and it was pretty damn good. I am fairly sure that
the movie “It came from Outer Space” which
was based on a Ray Bradbury story was in the same edition
and that was a bit more frightening though I have yet
to see it. Apparently it was originally in 3-D. The frightening
part was when various townspeople start to disappear,
to be replaced by alien “duplicates.” The aliens
are only glimpsed in brief flashes as they move through
the desert and the underground caves where they are hiding
but in the end they were quite benign and, having repaired
their spaceship wobble off to some far distant planet.

Perhaps the movies were indicative of the tensions and
suspicions that were emblematic of the cold war but if
they thought that they might make the aliens (Russians,
Chinese or anybody that wasn’t a middle class white
American) seem more human they didn’t work.
And of course there was Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future,
the British science fiction comic hero, created by illustrator
Frank Hampson who appeared in the Eagle comic from 1950
to 1967. read
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