‘Alarm’ Sends Warning on Tobacco Use

HBO presents a half-hour program tonight that is something to get choked up about.

It’s “Smoke Alarm: The Unfiltered Truth About Cigarettes,” another smart, creative, entertaining, highly valuable half-hour from Consumer Reports aimed at enlightening kids about their environment. In this case, that environment produces wheezing.

Not that the tobacco industry would define this program as truth, given its tenacious anti-smoking message that is so shrewdly packaged by producer John Hoffman, writer Jeff Kindley and director Steve Oakes.

You get a couple of joking, smoking, coughing “lounge lungs” (the voices of Renee Taylor and Joe Bologna). You get shock data via a game show called “Butts” (“Which kills more people in the U.S. today, smoking or car accidents?”).

You get an insidious fictional tobacco company marketing a new youth cigarette called Frank Mule, replete with a sophisticated ad campaign aimed not at kids but at “pre-smokers,” and Marlboro-like gift premiums that require so many packs to be bought that young smokers will get hooked while qualifying.

You get a cigarette rebellion (featuring the voices of Tony Danza, Lou Diamond Phillips and Tone Loc).

And you get testimony from kids--human ash trays, really--about their zest for smoking (“We’re gonna die anyways, wanna have fun”) that reveal just how much of an abstraction death is to the very young.

It remains to be seen whether any of this, however clever, will have much impact on hard-core young smokers or potential smokers too callow to have a sense of their mortality.

There is a persuasive segment here about a former snuff addict who lost half his jaw to cancer. That could do it. Just as vivid, though, are all-too-familiar declarations from teen smokers that they will quit the habit one of these years. At age 20 or 21, perhaps.

“But not today.”

* “Smoke Alarm: The Unfiltered Truth About Cigarettes” can be seen at 7 tonight on HBO.