As an ex-smoker, I was hooked on this by-numbers documentary Memoirs of a Cigarette Channel 4

I was determined to be a smoker from early childhood. My grandfather owned a musical cigarette lighter in the shape of a grand piano - the fags lay snugly under its lid, where the keys should have been - and I always longed to steal it. A keen buyer of candy "sticks", I was also the proud owner of a plastic fag filled with talcum powder, so that when you blew on it, "smoke" would emerge from the other end. Christmas was a particularly satisfying season for this pint-sized Fag Ash Lil: my grandparents obliged with chocolate smoking sets featuring cigarillos, cigars and a pipe. I used to eat the latter quickly, not even pausing to pose in front of a mirror first (let's face it, pipes never have been, and never will be, cool). The cigarillos I would mess around with in the privacy of my bedroom until they melted.

All of which is by way of explaining why it was that my critical faculties abandoned me as soon as the titles rolled for Memoirs of a Cigarette (10pm, 1 July). Old movie clips, dodgy ads, Will Self trying to be clever: this elegy for the fag had a formula so tired, its editor should really have sent it to bed early with no supper. Talking heads usually plunge me into despair, especially if one of them is June Sarpong, whose claim to fame is that she once interviewed Tony Blair (my dear, of course you did; he chose you specially, the same way he did those nice girls on GMTV). Yet I watched this hour-long documentary suspended in my own contentment as if in jelly. We ex-smokers are easily pleased (or perhaps just desperately self-justifying). The trouble with cigarettes is that, even once you've given them up, you're still theirs. Watching smoking, like reading about it, harbours the ghost of the act itself, so you suck on it, as it were, deeply. It also reminds you of the crushes and hero worship that got you started in the first place. As it was at school, so it is now: smokers rule. As Charlotte Rampling sparked up, her cat's eyes momentarily shrunk to buttonholes, I thought: Yeah . . . you and me both, babe.

For all those smug non-smoking cultural historians out there, there were plenty of shocking highlights. Who knew that the British government spent more on tobacco for the troops during the Second World War than it did on tanks, planes and ships? Or that Philip Morris once advertised a cigarette that it claimed was so gentle, you could smoke it while nursing your baby? But this stuff wasn't what enraptured me. The amazing rise and fall of the fag - from super-accessory to disgraced sidekick of the Grim Reaper - will never be as interesting to me as smoking itself: the way it makes you look, the way it makes you feel.

The irony of this film was that, though it was commissioned to mark the ban on public smoking in England, its most articulate moments worked in the cigarette's favour. The evidence against - orange fingernails, wrinkles the size of railroads and, er, the small matter of premature death - was dutifully piled up thanks to Joan Bakewell, among others. The trouble is (and please don't write in; I already know I'm the spawn of Satan) that the short of breath and feeble of lung will never truly take the lustre from the image of, say, Bette Davis sharing a smoke with Paul Henreid in Now, Voyager.

A clip was shown of Carrie's first date with Aidan in Sex and the City. "I don't want to be a jerk," said Aidan, played by John Corbett, "but I can't date a smoker." "But you are a jerk!" I shouted at the screen. Even in puritanical 21st-century New York, the scriptwriters were still using Aidan's dislike of nicotine to tell us something about his character (mostly that he was a stuck-up drip).

All of which makes me feel, contrary to what you might by now be expecting, that the ban on smoking in public places is a wholly good thing. We need saving from our shallow selves. But do I also mourn the cigarette's passing? Hate me for it if you like, but I'm afraid I do.

Pick of the week

The War on Britain’s Jews?
9 July, 8pm, Channel 4
Richard Littlejohn - yes, him - on anti-Semitism in Britain.

Dirt
9 July, 9pm, Five US
Courteney Cox as the ruthless editor of a Hollywood sleaze mag.

Alastair Campbell Diaries
11 July, 8pm, BBC2
Documentary based on the hotly anticipated (but much-edited) book.

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