So what does the BTA actually do? A huge chunk of the association members' year is spent travelling around the UK making unannounced calls on public loos and the people employed to maintain them. "Do you get any problems with cottaging? Any gays?" Richard asked one attendant. "Oh no, not here, " replied the attendant, whereafter we got a close-up of Richard making a big 'correct' mark in a box on a sheet of paper.

Unfortunately, most of the other markings seemed to be on the debit side of the paper. After yet another dispiriting visit to a particularly decrepit loo, Richard huffed and said, "The downward spiral continues, and where do we end up? I don't want to leave Britain, but so many of my friends have." My reading of this wasn't that he saw toilets as a metaphor for the degeneracy of his country, but that his friends were leaving the UK literally because of bad loos.

Some of the best toilet attendants Richard met on his travels were full of tales of woe, despite their heroic efforts. "You name it, I've seen it, " said a woman called Jenny. "I mean . . . why would anyone want to kiss tiles and leave lipstick on them?" Another proud loo cleaner from north Wales told of "a gentleman who goes around Prestatyn and does number twos in the urinals. You occasionally catch him in the act."

All this trekking around wasn't undertaken just for the good of association members' health . . . it was part of a judging process for the prestigious Loo of the Year awards. We got an idea of how these things are decided when the camera dropped in on the adjudicators' final round-table discussion on the matter: ". . . it was quite a big facility, and so was the cleaner. She was one of our, um, 'coloured' friends, but by gum, she was a breath of a fresh air." Out on the floor, entrants were abuzz with excitement. "We've won Best Unattended Semi-Automatic now for six years in a row, " said one proud gentleman from Mendip District Council. But the association ultimately ignored his and other ordinary decent cleaners' claims to top honours . . .

the biggest award of the night went to royalty, and the Duchess of Northumberland. Gah! The brown-nosers.

After all that scat-based verborrhoea, I've barely left myself any room to talk about the two most misleading programme titles of the week. If you're a cleversmart-arse you might have thought I Told You I Was Ill was about Spike Milligan (for it's those very words which appear on his gravestone). It wasn't though; it was a televised experiment in trying to get a bunch of hypochondriacs to cop themselves on. I had sympathy with two of the group . . . a man who was terrified of getting Aids, and a girl who thought she had cancer . . . largely because of the convincing look of fear that occupied their faces all the time, and largely because their fears originated in actual traumatic experience. (The man had had a blood transfusion; the girl's father had died of cancer. ) The rest of the group were less sympathetic; I thought they were wasting GPs' time, the show's psychologists' time, and, least importantly, my valuable time.

The other misleading programme title was What In The World? , which at no point featured Theresa Lowe in the 1980s asking families questions about geography. Instead, it was all about getting the career of another would-be TV presenter off the ground, namely Sean Og O hAilpin, who introduces each episode's half-hour of weighty, worthy, global issues. I'm telling you . . . a documentary one week, a telly-presenting slot another:

before you know it, this Sean Og thing is going to become a landslide. Will he be the next Hector, or will he be the next Omera Mumba?

Reviewed

One Life: For the Love of Loos Tuesday, BBC
One I Told You I Was Ill Monday, C4
What In The World? Thursday, RTE One