Peter Rhodes on Toulouse, three lies and four-million dollar homes with no curtains

After my item on the spread of gender-neutral toilets, a well-travelled reader tells me: “They have been banned in parts of France, notably Toulouse.”

And after my references to Nursery Snots, the range of conditions brought home by tiny toddlers at playgroup, I happened across the new movie, The Woman in the Window. It makes the point, as two mums discuss their lot, that while parents-to-be assume the children will belong to them, the truth, as you discover when they arrive, is that you belong to them.

It's not a bad film. One critic declared: “The Woman in the Window will have audiences closing their curtains.” I doubt if it will affect our curtain habits at all. It's set in a rich neighbourhood where rich folk pay four million dollars for a house but, mysteriously, can't afford curtains or blinds.

This has the great advantage for thriller writers in that if someone takes a shower, undresses for bed or plunges a carving knife into their spouse, somebody on the outside will see. If everybody had sensible polyester curtains, the entire whodunnit industry would collapse.

It was rumoured that the hardest part about making W1A, that brilliant satire on the BBC starring Hugh Bonneville, is that the Beeb is such a bizarre and strangely-administered organisation that it's almost impossible to parody. How, for example, could W1A writers satirise the Martin Bashir affair?

I refer not to the original fake-document scandal but the fact that during the Beeb's first investigation, Bashir was known to have lied on three occasions before admitting the truth– and yet he went on to be rewarded with the plum job of BBC religious affairs correspondent.

So how on earth did the Beeb's highest-profile sinner end up among the angels? I can think of only two explanations.

Firstly the Beeb, obsessed with box-ticking, could not resist appointing an ethnic-minority broadcaster to the religion job, even one with Bashir's track record. Secondly, did someone see a biblical justification for the thrice-lying Bashir's appointment?

The apostle Peter famously lied three times before the cock crowed, and yet still got the Church's top job. Mind you, he also ended up being crucified.

The BBC news reports on the Bashir scandal described the investigation as “excoriating” which is one of those words that makes us reach for the dictionary to discover it means “to criticise, berate or denounce severely.” It is also a word I never use because I get it confused with “coruscating” which means flashing brightly, intelligent and exciting or humorous.

Meanwhile, in the Beeb's new spirit of contrition and openness, any chance of it releasing the Balen Report? It commissioned this 20,000-word inquiry back in 2004 to investigate viewers' complaints that the Beeb's Middle East reporting was biased against Israel.

Since then the BBC has spent more than £300,000 in legal fees keeping it secret. The BBC's hallowed mission is “to inform, educate and entertain.” But not always.