Burning Desire: The Seduction of Smoking, BBC Two

When he's not investigating terrorism and the security services, Peter Taylor can usually be found probing into the tar-dripping innards of the tobacco industry. He's made a string of documentaries about it since the 1970s, as well as writing the book Smoke Ring: The Politics of Tobacco.

He has even become part of its historical archive, and we saw him here in a 1975 clip when, as a keen young reporter, he stood up at Imperial Tobacco's AGM to ask the chairman how he much he knew about the impact of smoking on health. This new two-part documentary brings the story of the industry's dogged battle against a steadily rising tide of anti-tobacco legislation up to date (below, the Marlboro Man - no longer a recommended role model).

The unanswerable question is why does anybody still smoke? Even the elusive Bigfoot and the remotest Amazon tribes must be aware by now that smoking causes cancer, heart disease and all kinds of pulmonary conditions. Yet a significant portion of the population remains immune to the increasingly grotesque warnings printed in ever-larger type on cigarette packets (complete with CSI-style horror photos of diseased lungs), and in Britain the number of smokers aged between 20 and 34 has even been increasing.  

Taylor takes a macabre and even unhealthy interest in this perverse manifestation of human frailty. He paid a visit to Diane and John Marshall, who both started smoking in the 1960s. John now suffers from Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (the handy new name for emphysema), while Diane has been diagnosed with lung cancer for a second time, having defied the experts the first time around. "I can only blame myself," she admitted.

The case of Brian Jackson shed even less flattering light on the tobacco business. When he took a job at Gallahers he was a non-smoker, but was told that he had to smoke if he wanted to work there. Now, at 62, he's also a COPD sufferer, and doubts he'll make it to 70.

Despite its lurid title, much of Burning Desire was a hard slog through piles of statistics and reminders of such historical milestones as the banning of tobacco ads on TV or smoking in public places, but the most interesting parts were about the way the industry is trying to adapt and survive. Twenty years ago a squad of tobacco executives brazenly swore to the US Congress that they didn't believe nicotine was addictive, but today this still massively profitable business has wised up and embraced some serious spin-doctoring.

Taylor (pictured left on Bondi Beach in Sydney) talked at length to Kingsley Wheaton, the matily dressed-down Corporate Affairs Director of BAT, and merely getting access to a tobacco company counts as progress. Wheaton didn't try to deny that smoking could be injurious to health, but took the line that the company was addressing rational adults who were capable of making their own decisions. BAT didn't want to dwell on the past, but instead is engaged in "plotting a pathway" to the future. This sounds a bit like trying to un-sink the Titanic, but BAT is working on a "tobacco harm reduction" strategy in which the new-fangled e-cigarette may play a critical role.

Elsewhere though, the tobacco giants keep wheeling out their old tricks. They waged a dirty propaganda war in Australia to try to forestall the introduction of plain packaging for cigarettes, and in Britain they're still battling energetically to convince legislators that plain packets will trigger a boom in counterfeit tobacco products. Consumer protection officials say they're talking utter nonsense, but Big Tobacco didn't get big by being benign and reasonable.