LAST week I wrote in my column about how glad I was that we don’t live in a country like China where silly censors are tightening their grip on the cinema.

Well it seems I was wrong.

Andy Hull, from the stop smoking organisation SmokeFree Liverpool, has said that he thinks all films that show a character sparking up a cigarette should be instantly rated 18.

He said that in the year 2000 they analysed 480 movies for smoking scenes.

Then he said: “Of the 3,300 children, young people, in Liverpool who started smoking that year, over half — 1,650 — will have started smoking as direct result of seeing these images on the big screen.”

A direct result? What, they saw Keira Knightley light up in Atonement and decided to nip down the road for some fags?

My God, how have we not realised this before? And how far could you go with it?

Let’s say one-seventh of the population now enjoy some gentle spanking at the weekend as a direct result of watching Maggie Gyllenhaal and James Spader in Secretary.

Or four out of 10 film goers requested that their doctors remove all memories of past lovers “as a direct result” of seeing Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, in which Kate Winslet has all knowledge of her relationship with Jim Carey wiped from her brain.

If I set myself up as the official spokesperson for the Bolton Society Against Cowboy Hats, could I say that having watched Brokeback Mountain, “over one half of people now wearing cowboy hats did so after seeing images of cowboy hats in the film”?

While, yes, it is important that 15 year old kids don’t start polluting their lungs with tar and chemicals and dying, it would take more than some campaigner on a mission to stub it out to convince me that films like Casablanca, shot on a set where cigarette smoke hangs like fog and all the better for it, should be reclassified as “adults only”.

And if communities genuinely want to stop children smoking, the answer isn’t to ban them from seeing a film where someone sparks up. It’s to stop selling them fags.