Documentary: We Love Cigarettes

A BBC Television documentary originally broadcast in 2006 documenting the planet's obsession and love affair with the cigarette.

A love of nicotine unites all peoples across the globe, regardless of colour, wealth or creed. Where religion and politics have failed, tobacco has succeeded, but at what cost? For over 50 years people have been knowingly paying for the pleasure of tobacco with their lives, making man's fatal tryst with the cigarette one of the weirdest love affairs ever.

A wide range of people are tangled in this web and by filming them for one day, simultaneously all over the world, Horizon has captured our extraordinary relationship with the cigarette.

Scientist and inventor of the nicotine patch Jed Rose has spent his working life trying to unravel the mysteries of nicotine addiction and searching for ever more ingenious ways to help people quit. Today, he's investigating the path of nicotine through the body by having his subject light up in a PET scanner.

Meanwhile in Texas, Dr Jeffrey Wigand, tobacco scientist turned whistleblower and subject of the Hollywood film The Insider, is preparing for his next appearance as expert witness in another anti-tobacco court case.

But as the West finally seems to be reaching the end of its affair with the cigarette, not everyone is pleased. Writer and smoking aficionado James Leavy laments the passing of a bygone age as he attempts to light up in a smoke-free Dublin. And in an attic in Yorkshire, artist David Hockney regrets the increasingly puritan, anti-pleasure sentiments that have made his "delicious vice" socially unacceptable.

Despite the woes of smokers in the West, globally the tobacco industry is worth $430 billion. Business is booming and in Southampton, British American Tobacco's blenders spend their day developing yet another irresistible smoke.

For while smoking bans in Europe and US abound, in poorer nations the love affair is still in its first flush. One third of the world's cigarettes are smoked in China. In Beijing, one man has made it his life's work to persuade 360 million Chinese smokers to give up. Zhang Yue spends this day snatching cigarettes from the lips of the unsuspecting and haranguing them in an attempt to get them to quit.

Meanwhile Allen Carr, retired accountant and discoverer of his own Easy Way to quit, faces his ultimate challenge. He will attempt to persuade every smoker watching to quit, by debunking four myths held close to every smoker's heart.

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