domingo, 8 de diciembre de 2013

Extensive listening: Addicted to pleasure-tobacco

Addicted to pleasure -tobacco is a BBC documentary aired in December 2012. Other episodes in the series include whisky, sugar, alcohol and opium.

In this programme, actor Brian Cox, who grew in  in the streets of Dundee, tells us how he lived surrounded by tobacco in his childhood. His entire family either smoked it or chewed it and yet Brian reveals, he never took up the habit.

To find out why not, Brian travels to Virginia in the US to discover how the habit of smoking kick-started the British Empire and created a global market of addicts. Brian discovers how manufacturers conspired to make cigarettes the optimal nicotine delivery system and that the Nazis were the first to make the link between smoking and lung cancer. Brian also takes a gene test which reveals just why he never took up the habit.



You can read the transcript for the first thirteen minutes of the programme here.