Tag Archives: warning

The celebrities of the cigarette warning world

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A moment of stress-clouded weakness earlier in the year led me to take up smoking again after a three-year break. I think God must have learned there was a 39-year-old Scotsman out there who’d marginally increased his life expectancy, and He wasn’t having any of it.

I always find the best time to start smoking again is just before a global pandemic that attacks the human respiratory system.

A lot’s changed since I’ve been away from the heady world of smoking, but unfortunately not the bit about cigarettes killing you. Apparently that’s still a thing. But the packaging has changed. The ante has been well and truly upped. The uncle, too. Hell, the whole fucking family. Lung surgery. Dead guys. Babies having a fly fag. I wouldn’t be surprised to pick up a packet of baccy one day to see it emblazoned with the elevator of blood from The Shining, along with the caption, ‘All smoke and no vape makes Jack a dead boy.’

My favourite warning picture is the one where a woman is sporting a mighty cough face while holding out a blood-spattered hanky. It made me laugh. Not because I find the thought of mouth and lung cancer hilarious – although if we’re all being honest with ourselves it’s probably still slightly funnier than Mrs Browns’ Boys – but because it got me to thinking about the woman in the photograph.

Some of the people featured on fag and baccy packets are real, especially the ones with sunken faces and tubes coming out of them. Sometimes these images have been used without permission. But cough lady is almost certainly an actress/model. How do I know this?

Let me set the scene.

RING RING, RING RING

“Hello?”

“Hi, I’m a photographer. I heard smoking gave you cancer. Mind if I come round and snap a picture of you having a bit of a big cough?”

“Sure. Come over. My baby smokes too if you want to get a few snaps of him at the same time?”

The photographer has been in the woman’s house for thirty minutes…

“Sure you don’t feel a wee cough coming on, ma’am?”

“Nope. Not at the moment.”

“…Want me to get you a packet of Salt and Vinegar Squares from the car; they’re pretty sharp, might help gee it along?”

“No thanks.”

(looks at watch) “It’s just I’ve got a bum cancer shoot in about forty minutes… maybe if you smoked a cigarette?”

“How dare you come in here an…CRU CRU HU HUUU HUU OHH HO HO HUH!”

(grabs camera) “Oh, brilliant, love, that’s it. Spew that lung for daddy! FANTASTIC, is that blood? Just hold it up there, yep, oh, that’s it, red like a rose. Red like Santa’s toilet paper after a bumpy sleigh ride. Just tilt it to me, love – maybe look a bit more horrified? PERFECT! The camera loves you, baby!”

That’s a photo shoot I couldn’t see even the world’s most ethically compromised photographer taking part in, much less the ‘model’. So the woman must have been hired from an agency. Specialising in what, exactly?

“Darling, I’m waiting on my agent calling, don’t use the phone!”

“It’s 2020, though, everyone’s got mobiles?”

“I know, darling, but the guy writing this blog used RING RING a few paragraphs back, he’s clearly something of a throwback, can we please just go with this?”

RING RING, RING RING

“Hello? (lowers receiver, covers mouthpiece) DARLING, IT’S MY AGENT! DON’T GO ON THE INTERNET, EITHER, I NEED THIS PHONE LINE TO STAY FREE. YOU CAN GO ON FRIENDS REUNITED LATER!”

“….”

“Sorry, hi. Thanks for phoning. You got me an audition? Oh I knew this moment would come! My big moment. My parents will finally be proud of me. What have you got for me? Cinema ad? Shakespeare play? Small part in a movie? Recurring role in Eastenders?

(silence)

You want me to pretend to have cancer in a photo?”

(husband sneaks up the hall with a bunch of flowers)

(she waves him away, shakes her head solemnly, lowers receiver again)

“Darling, you’d better cancel that Mini-Disc player we ordered through Littlewoods.”

Some strange things go through my head, they really do. Then I got to thinking, is there an awards’ night for people in this niche of the industry?

“Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the sixth annual awards gala for ‘People Whose Images Are Used in Terrifying and Embarrassing Ways’. And the nominations are… Barbara Findlayson, for ‘Woman pulling her mouth into an ‘O’ shape due to severe vaginal itching’. (polite applause) Jacob Graham for ‘Old man pishes himself at the bowling’. (polite applause)  Gloria Fonko, for ‘Woman screams because a spider bit her on the tit’. (polite applause) And Karen Globenstein, for ‘Woman who coughs blood and little bits of Salt & Vinegar Squares crisps into her favourite hanky because she’s got the cancer’. (whoops and cheers) Karen, get on up here, you son of a bitch!”

(Karen jumps to her feet and starts screaming with excitement) “TOMMY, CALL ARGOS AND GET THAT MINI-DISC PLAYER BACK ON THE GO. THROW IN A LASERDISC! FUCK IT, GET A FURBY AND A STEP-MASTER, TOO!”

Good on you, Karen.

Who says smoking is bad for you?

**CHAIN LETTER** PASS IT ON OR ELSE**

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If you don’t pass this chain letter on to at least five people within the hour, you’ll be killed by a witch.

No sense mucking around here. I know a lot of chain-curses go easy on you, promising a disappointing love life here, a lack of financial success there, occasionally threatening to give your hamster a mild head-cold or making your granny spill a cold cup of tea all over her budgie’s little face, or something equally inconsequential. But not here, my friend. No siree.

Witch. You. Dead.

Put it together, esse, and what do you get?

You. Being killed by a witch. An actual witch. Pointy hat, throaty cackle, the lot.

In fact, you don’t have an hour to pass this on. I’ve changed my mind. You’ve got five minutes. As the old rhyming augur goes: Hubble bubble toil and trouble, pass this on or you’ll… be… no… Nope, I can’t get it to rhyme. You’ll be killed by a witch, though. I really can’t stress that enough.

Maybe you’re thinking, ‘And? I could take a witch. Smash her right in her hooked nose and then ram her broken broomstick up her warty arse-pipe before she could even spell the word ‘HELP’, much less spell out a whole spell to turn my arse-cheeks into blacmange or whatever it is these witches do.’

Huh! Maybe in the 1970s, bucko, when witches were oppressed ethnically green women, but welcome to 2019, where your witch – my witch – is an enormous, 25-stone black biker called Cedric, with severe anger management issues. And he’s angry BECAUSE he’s called Cedric. He’s a vroom-vroom, witch-ass motherfucker who’ll beat you like the ginger step-child of a ginger step-child.

Cedric’s so tough he doesn’t even wear leathers. He’s comin’ at you with his balls hanging out of his shorts, son.

Still think you’re hard? Here’s some trips Cedric recently paid to smart-arses who don’t believe in chain e-mails:

  • A little girl got an iPad for her birthday. Her first email was this one. Her six-year-old ass deleted it. Later on, at her birthday party, Cedric turned all of the balloon animals into pig intestines, turned the guy doing the balloon animals into Santa, and then shot him dead in-front of her and forty of her little friends. It sort of back-fired, though, because the little girl was from Yemen, and after Santa’s execution the kids and parents all started chanting ‘Death to the West! Death to the West!’ Cedric is now the most sought-after children’s entertainer in the Middle East.
  • A gun-toting, email-deletin’ Trump supporter in Bradford, Texas was forced to watch as Cedric appeared before him inside a NASCAR stadium and proceeded to use the female bathroom.
  • A recalcitrant fox hunter in rural Lincolnshire was violently disemboweled as he lay in a farmer’s field writhing in agony, while Cedric summoned a million-strong army of fire ants to dance around his testicles. The guy didn’t even own a computer, and had never seen this email. Cedric just thought he deserved it because he was a bit of a dick.
  • Cedric cast a spell on Roderick Peterson from Leeds so that any time he heard a woman laughing, wherever he was, he’d start masturbating. Cedric now has his own show on Channel 5.
  • An eighty-year-old woman in Stevenage got a laptop from her grandson for her birthday, and deleted this email on the very first day. Cedric arrived to turn her blood into electricity and feast on the folds of her decaying brain as though they were strips of kebab meat, but found her clicking on Minesweeper and muttering about how confusing this online shopping thing was, as a YouTube video about adorable hippos blared out on another screen that she couldn’t shut down. She clearly didn’t have a fucking clue, so he spent the afternoon showing her the basics – ‘Is there a little person inside here moving that little arrow, Cedric?’ ‘No, Gladys, you move that with the mouse.’ ‘Eh? No mice in my house, sonny, I keep it neat as a pin.’ ‘No, look, you do this.’ ‘I do that?’ ‘You do that. And then this comes up. YouTube.’ ‘In my day you’d get the slipper for speaking to your elders like that, sonny.’ ‘Look, have you downloaded any apps, Gladys?’ ‘Are you speaking Creole to me? I’m not from Africa, son.’ After six hours Cedric excused himself, nipped to the bathroom, and decapitated himself with a rusty steak knife before flushing his head down the toilet.
  • A man in Paris, called Pierre or some shit, deleted this email as he sat smoking haughtily in a snooty eaterie, and Cedric instantly took away his desire to set fire to things with the rest of the Parisians whenever the council did something they didn’t like.
  • Tam Thomson from Airdrie deleted this email. Cedric appeared behind Tam as he walked through Airdrie town centre, took a look around, thought, ‘Fuck it, he’s suffered enough,’ and vanished again.

Do you really want to be like these luckless fucks? You can’t say you haven’t been warned. Stop this chain at your peril. Or, you know, if you fancy being on the tele, or your kid’s got a birthday coming up.