(Unless we live in Bath, that is, where the council has been gradually closing all its public facilities such as swimming pools and lavatories in the last few years, to help pay for the unopened spa, Nicholas Grimshaw's flawed and waterlogged masterpiece. No wonder there are so many people staggering round Bath of an evening. They are dying for the loo.)I am intrigued to learn from the toilet summit website that the average person goes to the loo 2,500 times a year, which is nearly seven times a day, and that the first cubicle you come to in a public toilet is the one that is least used, and therefore the cleanest...Is all this toilet talk making you feel uneasy? Of course it is We British don't like to talk about such things It's just something you do, and get out of the way. We say, 'Yertis.'" Fernuff.I do not suppose, however, that the experts in Belfast were discussing what to call a toilet. Nor what pictures or playful pictograms to put on the door for illiterates or foreigners. On the whole we seem to have settled down to the male and female outlines: one with skirt, one with trousers. (I once tried to persuade an American that because men wore kilts in Scotland, and Scots women wore trousers for warmth, the symbols were the other way round north of the border, but he may not have believed me, as I never heard of him being arrested up there.)No, I think what they were discussing in Belfast was the right of everyone to have access to public toilets, which is something we generally take for granted.

When we first moved down here to Wiltshire and went there for a drink, I asked someone where the Gents was and he pointed to a side door and said: "There's the sign."The only sign I could see said "Yertis." "Yertis ?" I said. I wish the BBC well, but like most of Britain, it's still looking rather obese More from Janet Street-Porter. "Experts gather for toilet conference" said the tiny headline in this paper on Monday 26 September, and so they were, by gum, for the grandly named World Toilet Summit in Belfast, and for a moment I felt a desperate need to go there too Not that my mother would have let me go World Lavatory Summit, yes. World Toilet Summit, no, for she was one of those old-fashioned people who thought that what you call a toilet makes a difference. I followed her lead for a long while in calling it a lavatory, but unfortunately most of the population do not, so I was often caught up in conversations such as this:Me: Excuse me, can you tell me where the lavatory is?Girl: The what?Me: Er, the toilet.Girl: It's over there.The last time I had a real problem with finding a loo was in our local pub, the Hop Pole.

So, all sorts of conflicts are being played out within the Corporation.The first thing that the new head of BBC announced he would be cutting was the red-clad irritating martial arts men who flap about between programmes. Already, freelance camera and sound staff are upset that an internal memo has set a date by which in-house factual programme producers and directors will have to shoot their own material using cameras with built-in microphones. Sooner or later, the BBC is going to have to shed not only staff but programming genres. The BBC already provides more than enough local programming - how many versions of the news at 6pm can one crowded island need? The BBC makes excellent programmes, and its website is outstanding. The trouble is that no one at the BBC can ever utter those magic words: "We're not doing it". And so, the BBC is going to provide a digital channel specifically for schools out of the licence fee.There are some audiences, like the 18-25 year-olds, which are over-catered for elsewhere, and yet the BBC still persists with a creaky Tops of the Pops and Radio 1.To meet quotas, the Corporation has gone so far down the road of regional accents that it's almost impossible to hear anyone with a London accent on the national channels All very laudable. High-definition television is something manufacturers are thrilled about, but not necessarily the public.The second thing the BBC needs to do is to decide what programme areas it is going to give up on.