The Big Smelly
2003-09-11

A few nights ago Mrs Sprout and I were watching television when a helicopter – no doubt in pursuit of yet another escaped lunatic from the local asylum – passed quite low over the house. The noise went whuppity-whuppity-whuppity-whuppity, only much louder, of course, and Mrs Sprout turned to me and said, "Imagine what the noise must be like in Mega-City One."

Now, this caught me out a little; partly because it's not like her to spontaneously introduce the topic of Judge Dredd and related matters, but mostly because I realised I had never really thought about it before.

But she's right: the noise in Mega-City One must be absolutely horrendous! Okay, so there's no petrol which means that they don't use internal combustion engines, but still... With all those vehicles rumbling around all day, all night, you'd need quintuple-glazing on your apartment windows and some military-grade earplugs to keep the noise out.

And then there's the noise of the people, too. Four hundred million citizens, and at any given time at least half of them would be awake. Talking, arguing, laughing (well, maybe not laughing all that much). On top of that, there's all their TVs playing. I mean, we live across the road from a woman who plays her country music albums for a couple of hours every morning, loudly, with all her doors and windows open. It's not at all pleasant, but it's still got to be a hell of a lot better than MC-1.

I'm sure that living in Mega-City One has other drawbacks... Imagine the smell! Anyone who's visited London in the height of summer will know just how bad a city can smell. Mega-City One has a population forty times that of London... And what about all those fatties who I'm sure spend a good deal of their time breaking wind? It'd be like living inside Judge Death's underpants on a hot day, after he's just run a marathon.

And speaking of the population: four hundred million people, most of them with functioning bladders. Let's say that the average person pees about a litre a day (I've no idea if that's even close to accurate – I must remember to bring a measuring jug next time I go to the bog). So, four hundred million litres of wee-wee per day. That's one hundred and forty-six billion litres every year!

So where does all that toilet-juice go? Into the Black Atlantic? No wonder Captain Skank was annoyed! And of course the average person makes poo-poo once a day too. What happens to that?

Combine that with all the showers and baths they must take, the running of taps to fill the kettle, plus washing machines and dishwashers, and so on: where do they get all the clean water from? I mean, we know that it rarely rains in the city because the citizens are allowed to vote on their choice of weather, and we know they can't take the rain from the Cursed Earth because it'd be poison.

Anyone who's ever been in charge of running a small country – like I have – will know how difficult it is to supply clean water to all the people. Okay, so MC-1 doesn't have much in the way of outlying farms, but just think of the height of some of the city-blocks: you'd need an incredibly powerful pump to get water up to the top of one of those babies!

MC-1 was built on the ruins of the old east coast cities, but those cities weren't demolished – they were just paved over. There's people and things who still lived down there, and they don't have access to running water. Or soap. They don't have anywhere to recycle their waste (or their dead). But they don't suffocate, so that means that there must be air getting in to them. And if air from MC-1 can get in to the undercity, then air from the undercity can get out too...

So with all this in mind, I'm beginning to think that the real heroes of Mega-City One are not the Judges, they're the sanitation department. Grud bless 'em!