The idea that Tom and Jerry cartoons will be cut to remove smoking scenes is at once ridiculous and depressing. As we report today, Turner Broadcasting proposed to media watchdog Ofcom that the offending cartoons be edited of any scenes that appear to condone or glamorise smoking, such as Tom demonstrating his rolling-up skills to impress a female cat.
It's so obviously ridiculous it barely needs spelling out... for one thing, I sincerely doubt that the target audience - between four and 14 years of age, though presumably at the lower end of that scale - are in much position to buy or smoke cigarettes. And do these kids actually watch Tom and Jerry for moral instruction, seeking to model their actions on the antics of an animated cat? Of course not. It's just mindless fun.
From what I remember - and I haven't watched Tom and Jerry since I was below smoking age - the cartoons are often stupendously violent and involve all kinds of exceedingly dangerous stunts, but somehow I doubt these scenes will be cut. And quite right: no kid is going to jump off a bridge or smack someone over the head with a frying pan in emulation of a cartoon cat or mouse.
And so on to the depressing aspect of this. It is nothing short of censorship, and censorship is almost always pernicious and unnecessary. It's a betrayal of the original Tom and Jerry creations, an attempt to cleanse history of its inconvenient detail and sanitise the art of the past. Yes, it's only Tom and Jerry, but it's the thin end of the wedge. Modern society's increasingly dictatorial campaign against the smoking habit also greatly irks me (a non-smoker), but this isn't the key issue here.
I see this more in line with other retrospective bans such as one the BBC considered back in May 2004 when it contemplated deleting offensive words from old sitcoms, such as Granddad Trotter talking about "Paki shops" in Only Fools and Horses. The argument against this Bowdlerisation was well made in the Guardian by Julian Baggini: "Film and television are part of our social history and if we erase from them those blemishes which would rightly offend us now, we also wipe from the record our shameful history of prejudice and discrimination."
Personally, I wouldn't put Tom's tobacco habit in that league of infamy, but it's still censorship and still wrong.
