Going to the toilet must have been a bit of an adventure a hundred years ago. Flushing water closets were just beginning to be introduced and most homes still had to rely on outside dry toilets in the backyard. These toilets were often shared with your neighbours and emptied once or twice a week by the “scavenger” who would mix the content of your toilet with ash and other rubbish then sell this smelly mess to farmers as fertilizer.

There was no such thing as soft toilet paper, but hard, shiny, medicated papers like “Spicer’s A1” were considerably better than the usual torn-up newspaper.

We all had a look at the old toilet that had been built in the museum and imagined what it would be like to use one on a cold dark night with only the light of a candle. It would be even more horrible if there was no proper toilet roll, just bits of old newspaper. We decided to make an advertisement showing how happy someone would be to find proper toilet paper.

We had fun making and recording the noises. Several children made up tunes on our sound recording day but Erin aged 3 was exceptionally good on the piano so we used her tune in the background of the intro scene. Many children had great fun recoding trumping noises, we choose Arran aged 18mths, Georgia 7 and wee Philip who gave us the raspberry noises.

Lots of children helped us by letting us take photos of their hands which were the digitised and used in the animation. One of our ‘Mums’ (Rhoda 21) help us out when it came to narration as this got a bit difficult at times! Christopher aged 4 and Neil (21) a dad, were press-ganged into doing the ‘straining noises’. Danielle 11 cried ‘Fantastic’ into our mic and toilet flushing sounds were recorded by James

About the Project

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Castor Oil