The latest anti-smoking campaign puts young people in the director’s chair. John Davies reports

How do you persuade young people to stop smoking? If, as the latest statistics tell us, 9 per cent of Britain’s 11 to 15-year-olds are regular smokers - a figure that rises to almost 25 per cent if just 15-year-olds are counted - what should the health authorities do? One answer, of course, is to run anti-smoking media campaigns, a strategy that has met with limited success.

Cigarette use is highest among those aged 20 to 24, and most smokers start in their teens. So could it make sense to run a campaign that is not only aimed at teenagers but also devised by them? As health minister Lord Hunt puts it: “We’re far beyond the old health education philosophy of adults telling everyone else what they can and cannot do. If we’re really going to get information through to young people, one of the best ways of doing that is to use young people themselves communicating with their peers.”

That is the thinking behind Smokescreen, a pilot project financed by the Department of Health to the tune of some pound;250,000. With this money, the “creative agency” Brainchild has commissioned five groups of young people, mostly in London, to each make a short film “about the culture of cigarettes and smoking”. The five films, put together with the help of professional film directors who work in advertising, can now be seen on the cablesatellite channel Trouble, in cinemas and on the internet. The channel has set aside two five-minute slots every weekday evening for the films - between showings of American-made audience-pullers such as Baywatch and Saved by the Bell.

Trouble TV does not command huge audiences. Its best viewing figure in an average week can be around 150,000, although it claims more than 1.5 million 10 to 24-year-olds tune in at some point. Still, the films will not be out of place on the channel: “Pretty much every hour or half-hour we’ll use a pop video or a music interview at programme junction,” says channel editor Heather Jones. “So our viewers are used to seeing mini-programmes of two to four minutes.”

As for the Smokescreen films themselves, it’s a moot point whether they persuade the target audience to avoid tobacco. Significantly, the publicity calls them “short films based on the culture of smoking” rather than anti-smoking films. Ms Jones says the intention from the start was to avoid being “patronising or overly informative”, and notes that the films “took their inspiration from pop videos, some of which have quite obscure messages”.

Certainly, the films betray the influence of pop culture: they vary from parody advertisements (Fag Break, by a team aged nine to 15 from the Camden-based Weekend Arts College) and simple animation combined with snatches of dialogue (Brown Doves, by a group of girls from Grey Coat Hospital school, Westminster) to story-with-a-moral (Killing Me Softly, by a group of teenagers from the Tabernacle community centre in West London). Perhaps the two most accomplished are Dealer’s Day by six pupils from Holland Park comprehensive, London borough of Kensington and Chelsea, and On a Mission, for which the ideas of an eight-member group based at the Moss Side Millennium Powerhouse, a young people’s training and advice centre in Manchester, were realised by director Martin Brierley, who has worked on advertisements, pop videos and the film Alien 3.

“The kids were in the role of clients,” says Mr Brierley. “They could choose the director. So I went up to Manchester with my showreel, did a presentation to them and hoped that I was appropriate for their vision of their script.”

Mr Brierley confirms that On a Mission, which portrays a sinister future world visited by the main character after he falls down the back of a sofa in search of his last cigarette, is the Millennium Powerhouse team’s own creative work. “All I did was help bring out more strongly those elements of their story that weren’t being heard clearly enough in the narrative, and make the structure slightly more dramatic. They were very keen to refer to nicotine and tobacco as drugs that would lead you into dark places.”

Humour rather than horror characterises Holland Park’s Dealer’s Day, another futuristic scenario that imagines a time when selling tobacco is driven underground. “We tried to make it as funny as we could,” says one of the team, 17-year-old Henar Perales. “Everyone knows that smoking is bad. But if they laugh and they like our film, the message does stay in some kind of way.” She believes that straightforward anti-smoking advertisements “don’t work very well. It depends on how much they shock you.”

Like 19-year-old student Nehru McKenzie of the Millennium Powerhouse team, Henar is an ex-smoker. But it was less anti-smoking zeal than media ambition that got both of them involved in Smokescreen: Nehru wants to be a film-maker and says he worked on the film for the experience, while Henar will be including Dealer’s Day in her A-level media studies portfolio.

Still, if these films get the right kind of exposure, and if, as Lord Hunt says, Smokescreen “isn’t by any means the only string to our bow - the work that’s done in schools on health education has a part to play”, then the Government won’t have spent its money in vain. Even though, in Martin Brierley’s words, “it’s not like selling widgets, where you can count how many more widgets have left the shelves after your ad has been shown”.

The Smokescreen films can be seen on the Trouble TV satellitecable channel every weekday this month at 7.25pm and 8.55pm, or accessed at www.thesmokescreen.co.uk Trouble TV’s website is www.trouble.co.uk The advertisements will also be running in national cinemas in late December.The NHS stop smoking helpline is 0800 1690169; website: www.givingupsmoking.co.ukl Curriculum reviews, page 22