[Click through to the site to listen to the audio]

See also: this previous post, again inspired by an item on You And Yours¹, on Birkenhead Park, complete with lively debate in the comments about its claim to be the first public park in the world.

1. Yeah, I listen to You And Yours quite a lot: proof, if proof be need be, that my Radio 4 addiction is completely out of hand. Just be thankful that I’m not posting excerpts from The Archers (which has been quite exciting lately, what with Owen’s rape trial).↩

You might not have noticed, but there are currently two separate campaigns airing for products that stop your loo smelling of poo featuring camp speaking toilets. (I can’t for the life of me remember the brands in question - they’re bad adverts in every sense.)

In both, women are shamed by their talking toilets into taking more care over the odors eminating from the bowl, lest their houseguests think ill of them. In one ad., the loo is voiced by Julian Clary (or an impersonator) in the other, it’s a generic Kenneth Williams-esque voice that chides the housewife.

The reason for this queering of the toilet bowl is simple: you can’t have a woman sitting on the face of a humanoid toilet that is explicitly hetero - the wonks scripting the ad. are in weird enough territory as it is without introducing a cunnilingual subtext to the relationship between the Everywoman heroine and her newly clean and sweet-smelling shitter.

In his complaint about the Muller campaign, Tom chooses to miss out a layer of the Muller spot, one shared by the adverts featuring our poofy toilet friends - the gay Air Steward (what a lazy, lazy stereotype) who looks at a man’s willy to make people buy yoghurt (do they really want to associate yoghurt with cocks?) doesn’t do so with a lascivious glance, nor does he make an aggressive pass. Instead, it’s a purse-lipped end-of-the-peir mug to camera. So, instead of have the protagonist fuck his girlfriend in some yoghurty way, we are shown her getting distracted by a delicious tub of Muller Light, while her boyfriend is forced by circumstances beyond his control to have a non-sexual encounter with a gay man.

WTF?

On the one hand, this could all be seen as an extension of media representation of gay men as inherently asexual, non-threatening figures of fun - just as damaging a stereotype as the one Tom identifies when he says:

When I was growing up gay I was under the misapprehension that gay people were dirty and sickening and pathetic because of adverts like this.

But I think it’s more complicated than that. In all these adverts, sex is being used to sell products - whether it’s the winking harpies (Harpics?!) who trade double-entendres with their living toilets, or the woman who prefers a tub of live culture to the attentions of her man - but the implication of shagging is diffused through a neutered-but-sexual homosexual. That’s at least as dangerous a message (or chunk of social control, if you’re feeling paranoid) as the, erm, straight portrayal of gay men as threatening pervs - these adverts say, effectively, that gay men are naughtily suggestive of sexual activity, but also that they themselves are barred from that activity.

It’s a bit like dressing your Barbie doll up like a slut, only to point out to everyone that she has no cunt.

There’s a point buried up there somewhere, I think (in this post, I mean, not your Barbie doll). It’s probably that until the television advertising industry starts presenting gay men (and lesbians, who are similarly much-used in their most unthreatening, lipsticky form) in the way that, say, advertising has, on the whole, learned to present mixed race couples, or ethnic minorities in general, without making it an issue, letters of complaint like Tom’s are much needed.

I’m a big fan of municipal public parks, if only because there is something fundamentally decent about the state providing areas for recreation and reflection. The fact that these spaces are transformed at nightfall into arenas for anonymous sex acts, violent muggings and underage drinking adds a frisson to the more legitimate daylight activities of frisbee throwing, dog-walking and, well, underage drinking.

Birkenhead Park was the first municipal public park in the world, opening its gates on the 5th of April 1847. Designed by Sir Joseph Paxton (better known as architect of the Crystal Palace) the Park is an artificial countryside of meadows, man-made hills and valleys, lakes shaped to look like rivers, and occasional follies - a Swiss Bridge, an Italian Lodge - dotted about the landscape. It set the template for public parks, too, notably Central Park in New York, designed by F.L. Olmsted, who incorporated many of Birkenhead’s features in his plans after visiting in 1850.

So, why did a backwater¹ like the Wirral end up as the site for the world’s first public park? It seems to be down to a quirk of geography. The Wirral, you see, is a penninsula, and the River Mersey served as a barrier to encroaching industrialisation - while Liverpool grew fat on the proceeds of shipping, and cemented its position as a hub of trade between Europe and the Americas, Birkenhead and the rest of the Wirral stayed stuck in the agrarian past. The steam ferry service, which opened in 1820 and runs to this day (albeit tainted by the warblings of Gerry Marsden) changed all that, and Birkenhead’s population rocketed from a few hundred souls to two and a half thousand, within a decade of the first ferry ‘cross the Mersey. This slight delay in industrialisation turned out to be a boon, for park-lovers at least - Birkenhead’s rise matched the growth in reform movements, spurred by the terrible living and working conditions in established industrial towns and cities and dedicated to improving the lot of the working classes. The Parks Movement in particular was gathering steam in the mid-1800s, based on the principle that a nice bit of open space does wonders for the well-being of the workforce, both for their benefit, and in the interests of maximising profits, ideas close to those that underpinnned the work of, say, Joseph Rowntree.

I find this brand of 19th Century largesse, with it’s unlikely forms of wealth redistribution, fascinating. Consider this post the first in a mini-series on the subject, liable to take in workers’ villages like Port Sunlight and Bourneville, the odd relationship between non-conformist Christianity, sweet manufacturing and philanthropy, and Joseph Williamson’ssubterranean New Deal.

1. A comment in defence of the borough from my Dad is inevitable, but The Wirral is a backwater.