Sewers and Big Brother

I also learn (à propos of nothing) that

Peter Bazalgette, the “chief creative officer” of the production company that makes Celebrity Big Brother, is the great-grandson of Joseph Bazalgette, the engineer of genius who built Victorian London’s sewer system.

This, by the way, is in a review of Marshall McLuhan's essays. I read Understanding Media at university, and aside from the pleasure of picking up a lot of previously unthinkable (and possibly untenable) connections between one ordinary object (such as a spitoon) and the grandest ideas, took very little from the process. Except that, much later, I remember reading somewhere that McLuhan, a devout Catholic, had written this as a sort of imaginative projection of where we were headed without God. That it was sort of satire, on the lines of Swift's Modest Proposal. No idea of the truth of that assertion.