The Toilet: An Unspoken History

'My name is Ifor ap Glyn,

'and I have a peculiar fascination with toilets.

'Now, you may find that funny

'but, as we'll discover later, that's part of the story too.

'As a child, I lived an unremarkable life in the London suburbs

'with all the mod-cons.

'My daily trip to the toilet was something I just took for granted.

'That was until I went to stay with an elderly uncle and aunt

'on their remote farm in Cardiganshire, in Mid Wales.

'When the call of nature came,

'I was directed down the garden path

'towards a small outhouse.'

And I was faced with a toilet very similar to this one.

It was a bucket privy

that just had a cover on it.

Spares of newspaper hanging on a nail.

So, it seemed simple enough and I used it.

I went back in the house afterwards and the first question I had was,

"Did you put something on the bucket afterwards?"

"Well, yes," I said, "I put the cover back on."

"No, no, no, no. Did you put something on the bucket afterwards?"

"I just told you, I put the cover back on." "No, no, no, no, no."

And it was at that point I was made to understand

that there was this second bucket in the toilet,

full of ash from the fire,

and the idea was that you'd spread ash from the bucket

into the toilet bucket, covering your business, minimising smell.

And then put the cover on to keep the flies out.

There was more to this toilet business than I had imagined,

even with a simple toilet like this.

And that's where my unhealthy fascination with the world of toilets began.

'What intrigues me is how we've all got used

'to taking our excrement for granted.

'And I began to wonder, how we got to this state of affairs?

'So I'm setting off on a journey

'to discover what our toilets can tell us about ourselves.

'We'll discover a rich and surprising history

'of how the toilet has evolved over 3,000 years.

'How it's been transformed through ingenious leaps of engineering,

'as part of a huge industry

'dedicated to satisfying our every whim.

'With a future stranger than you might imagine.

'All of us have a very personal and private relationship

'with the toilet.

'This is my journey to discover the unspoken history

'of the small unmentionable room

'in the corner of all our lives.'

FLUSHING NOISE

Dealing with our bodily waste

is one of those challenging issues we all have to face.

Ideally, we'd like it to be whisked away

without anyone having to touch it,

leaving no embarrassing stink in its wake

and no germs to threaten us.

But that's easier said than done,

and it's a problem we've been wrestling with throughout history,

as the earliest religious texts reveal.

According to The Bible,

"Thou shalt have a place also without the camp

"whither thou shalt go forth abroad:

"And thou shalt have a paddle upon thy weapon;

"and it shall be, when thou wilt ease thyself abroad,

"thou shalt dig therewith,

"and shalt turn back and cover that which cometh from thee."

But how far should you go out of the camp?

Well, according to one Hindu text,

they advice that you should fire an arrow into the air

and only defecate where the arrow landed.

According to the Vishnu Purana, from 2,000 years ago,

you shouldn't defecate within 150 feet of a water source

or 15 feet of a house.

So let's go back to the dawn of civilisation.

'Over 2,000 years ago, Indians, Chinese and Cretans

'can all lay claim to having built the first flushing toilets.

'But it was the Romans who really got to grips with the problem.

'I'm in Spain, at the site of some wonderfully preserved Roman ruins.'

The Romans had grasped the essentials of sanitation -

the need to contain your waste

and move it away without anybody touching it,

the need to minimise smell

and the need to clean yourself up afterwards.

Now, these ruined latrines here at Merida

show how they addressed all of those problems,

and very successfully indeed.

This was a communal privy.

You would have sat here, the seat has disappeared,

and your waste would have dropped

into this drainage channel here.

Thus solving the first of the two problems -

the water flushed the waste away, nobody had to touch it.

And, of course, as it dropped into the water, that minimised smell.

Now, then, this second water channel running in front of us here

was what you would have used

to wash yourself afterwards.

You would have had a stick with a piece of sponge on the end,

dip that in the water,

wash behind yourself,

thus giving rise to the phrase,

"The importance of not getting hold of the wrong end of the stick."

This example gives us a better idea

of what Roman toilets would have looked like nearly 2,000 years ago.

There's a surviving piece of seat

that has been mounted on

that metal frame there nearest to us

and then the six seats next to it are replicas

that have been made out of concrete.

And we can see a surviving washing channel in front of the seats,

that's where the Romans would have dipped their sponge sticks in

in order to wash themselves.

And this was a public toilet

situated just behind the theatre here.

We can see the main drainage channel stretches away quite a way.

There was in fact room for 25 seats here,

it was a considerable feat of engineering.

Romans had no issues using the toilet together

or sharing a poo stick or two.

Perhaps there was no embarrassment yet

because most people had never experienced toilet privacy.

Clean water was too precious just to use for clearing away human waste,

so grey water from drinking fountains and baths across the city

was channelled here to flush away waste,

only as its last stop on the way out of the city.

But this supply of water was only made possible

by the aqueducts found throughout the Roman Empire.

Even today, we still marvel at aqueducts like this one,

part of a three-mile network,

engineered with a precise dropping gradient

in order to bring a constant supply of water

to the baths and toilets of Merida.

Later generations came to know this as the Acueducto De Los Milagros,

the aqueduct of miracles, because they simple couldn't conceive

that something as magnificent as this had been built

without divine agency.

But, of course, as the Roman Empire tottered and fell,

we forgot a lot of things that the Romans had taught us,

not least their innovations in the field of sanitation.

'Exploring ruins like these in Merida,

'you are constantly struck

'by the scale and sophistication of the building works.

'But Roman author Pliny the Elder

'described the Roman sewerage systems as,

'"The most noteworthy thing of all."

'And with good reason.

'The city of Rome itself boasted a water and sewerage system

'supporting a population of over one million.

'But, as the Empire declined, this infrastructure crumbled

'and such a population was no longer sustainable.

'By the Middle Ages, Rome was home to only 30,000 people.

'Toilets like those in Merida

'can be found all across the Roman Empire,'

including these ones on Hadrian's Wall.

But, within a few decades of the Romans' departure,

Britons abandoned the lessons they'd taught us about sanitation.

It's possible people just didn't have the building skills

to keep the system working.

But there is also a theory that pagan Britons

never truly accepted the Roman ways.

Pagan beliefs celebrated the cleanliness of water;

to contaminate it perhaps went against this belief system.

Whatever the reason,

Britain was heading back to the lavatorial dark ages.

For the next 1,000 years, sanitation meant shitting in the fields.

'As medieval settlements grew,

'we start to see the emergence of organised toilets,

'but they were nothing like as advanced as the old Roman designs.

'Back in the 13th century,

'excrement would fall out of these gaping toilet holes

'in the town walls of Conway from the crude toilets above.'

There would have been a wooden seat here instead of this metal grating.

But they'd hardly have been comfortable things to use.

Imagine the stench, even though your business was dropping away down that chute.

Some of it would probably have smeared down the walls.

In the summer, there would have been flies and an incredible smell,

In the winter, although it wouldn't have been quite as exposed as this,

there would still be a draft coming up from below.

Sir John Harrington, writing in the 16th century, described it as,

"Sitting on the draft."

I think I know what he meant.

The waste then dropped down here

into the dry moat beneath,

where it was the job of the gongfermor to carry it away by hand.

'The gongfermor, or gong farmers, worked at night to transport

'human waste away from the town boundaries.

'So, for centuries after the Romans had left,

'the most advanced toilet in Britain still depended on some poor soul

'welding a bucket and spade.

'By Tudor times,

'toilets were starting to appear in the richest households,

'but they were still crude and smelly,

'as we can see from this merchant's house in Tenby.'

The original cesspit still survives.

Amazingly, opens off the kitchen.

There was a long-drop toilet

dropping down into the pit beneath.

Now, some time in the 17th or 18th century,

it fell into disuse and it was filled in.

But the waste that remained beneath offers us a fascinating snapshot

of what life what's like in Tudor times.

Now, when they excavated it,

they found bits of pottery

that indicated they were trading with Mediterranean countries,

they found fish bones, they found all kinds of different seeds

that showed the rich variety of diet they had.

They also found a lot of worm eggs

that indicated they were infested with parasites.

But, most interestingly for us,

they also found bits of woven flags

and wool.

It seems that wool was the wipe of choice for wealthy Tudors.

Now, the excavations also reveal that they dyed the wool

with madder and with woad.

Now, both these plants had medicinal properties

that soothed sore Tudor bottoms.

Pretty much like the aloe vera that we put in posh toilet paper today.

'For the wealthy, there was also the option of building an outhouse,

'like this one in Somerset.'

Well, if you had a splendid privy like this one

and an army of servants to clear up after you,

I'm sure the sanitary arrangements

must have been fairly tolerable.

In the mid 15th century,

a man named John Russell wrote the Book Of Nurture,

a rhyming guide of what was expected of a butler

in an aristocratic household.

And this is what he had to say about the sanitary arrangements.

"See the privy-house for easement be fair, soot and clean;

"and that the boards thereupon be covered with cloth, fair and green;

"and the hole himself, look there no board be seen;

"thereon a fair cushion,

"the ordure no man to teen."

No bare boards underneath the bottom of John Russell's master then.

'However, for the height of luxury,

'you didn't need a servant

'to spread a piece of cloth under your posterior,

'you needed a river

'running under your outhouse.'

The scouring action of the river in privies like these

must have set people thinking,

"What if we could bring a river

"into the house via a system of pipes?"

In other words, what if we did exactly the same thing

as the Romans did 1,500 years earlier?

The penny, which had dropped for the Romans 1,500 years before,

was starting to drop again for everyone else.

Once again, the notion of the flushing toilet began to emerge

and the first person to benefit was Queen Elizabeth I.

'Here at Gladstone Pottery Museum in Stoke,

'we can glimpse what must have brought great pleasure to Her Majesty.'

The first water closet was built in 1594 by sir John Harrington.

Now, the originals have long since disappeared,

but the museum has built this replica.

It's got a tank of water here.

This rod lifts a plug

that empties the tanks

into the bowl here

and then, when you've finished your business, you lift this second rod

which lifts another plug, which empties the contents of the bowl

into a cesspit beneath.

Now, Harrington only built two of them - one for his own home

and one for his godmother,

who was no lesser person than Queen Elizabeth I.

But his design didn't catch on - it was expensive, it was smelly

and it depended on a constant supply of water,

which most homes at that time just simply didn't have.

Over 170 years later, in 1775, watchmaker Alexander Cummings

filed the first ever patent for a toilet.

His design included an s-bend

to keep the smell at bay,

but it wasn't integrated into the main unit.

It also had a sliding valve to empty the bowl.

This didn't work so well

as the sliding action could

pull faeces back into the works,

resulting in smell and clogging.

The basic elements are all here,

just not quite in the right order or working that well.

His design was improved in 1778 by Joseph Bramah.

This is a Bramah closet

and, as you can see,

the mechanism for opening the valve is quite complicated.

He replaced the sliding mechanism with a self-cleaning hinged valve.

This drop action meant gravity

helped solids to fall away,

and the provision of a constant trickle of water into the bowl

created an additional smell-resistant seal.

With a few modifications, Bramah's design remained in production

right up to the eve of the Second World War.

During the 150 years of their production,

his toilets found their way

into many of Britain's great stately homes.

They even made it into the Palace of Westminster

where they still have a working example in the House of Lords.

Well, the Lords aren't sitting today,

so we've been allowed to come in

and have a look at their Bramah.

Wow, look at that!

Oh, isn't that magnificent?

And you can hear the water running down

into the bottom of the bowl to seal the valve here.

And if we lift this up here,

we can have a better look at it.

If I take the front off...

I'll get a bit of light on it.

Now, you can see the toilet stands

in this lead tray here

to catch any drips or leaks

and we can see that this arrangement

for opening the valve at the bottom

and also for opening the flush at the back here

is rather unsightly.

That's way it's boxed away within this wooden affair.

But, remarkably, this toilet dates from the 18th century

and it's still working, it's a tribute to British engineering.

Bramah toilets were the Rolls-Royce of toilets.

They were the toilet choice for the upper classes.

And, in fact, for a while in the English language,

Bramah was slang for something really good.

Bramah!

But Toilets couldn't remain the preserve of the upper classes.

There was a revolution afoot,

thanks in part to something that happened right here -

the Great Stink of 1858.

Now, for centuries, Londoners had simply been dumping

their raw sewage into the Thames.

But, in 1858, London became the first modern city

to reach breaking point from a sanitation point of view.

The stench from the Thames that year was so bad

that the curtains of the Palace of Westminster had to be doused with chlorine.

MPs had to speak with perfume handkerchiefs clutched to their noses.

What had been considered up to that point to be a minor irritation

had now become a national priority.

To deal with the raw sewage pouring into the river,

Joseph Bazalgette famously started work on the engineering masterpiece

that is the London's sewage system.

But dealing with the raw sewage also set people

thinking seriously about the toilet itself.

The next 30 years saw countless small innovations in toilet design

as manufacturers like Thomas Twyford and George Jennings

crept towards the Holy Grail -

'a toilet cheap and efficient enough to sell to everyone.'

By the 1880s, a number of manufacturers

had made the final breakthrough

in the race to provide a toilet for the mass market.

They incorporated the s-bend within a single ceramic pedestal.

No smells, no leaks and it was cheap to produce.

THIS is the forerunner of the modern toilet.

And, in fact, this model, the Unitas, sold in its millions,

not just across Britain, but across the world.

In fact, to this day, the word Unitas in the Russian language

is still the word for toilet bowl.

But there was also one other notable brand name

very familiar in Victorian Britain.

Now, there's one name we haven't mentioned yet,

one name you've probably been expecting to hear all along.

That's the name of Thomas Crapper.

Now, Thomas Crapper didn't invent the toilet,

the word crap doesn't come from his name,

Thomas Crapper didn't even in fact manufacture toilets at all.

What he did do was get other people to build them for him

and then he made sure that his name featured prominently

on all the cisterns and bowls,

so that when he sold them on to other people,

the name they associated with the toilet was Thomas Crapper.

Toilets like this.

Crapper was a very good marketing man.

By the 1880s, sanitation had well and truly arrived.

Thomas Crapper sold countless toilets as they were installed

in middle class homes across the land.

But the toilet was also going public.

'The first modern flushing public convenience

'opened in London in 1851.

'They then spread around the country with ever more ornate examples

'springing up like these in Cardiff city centre.'

This place is simply magnificent,

there's an almost imperial confidence to the design,

reflecting, of course, Britain's place in the world at the time.

And I just love the solidity of these sumptuous marble urinals here,

the way that they almost wrap themselves around you,

like a comfortable overcoat.

And look at this bull's-eye here -

thoughtfully provided for you to aim at

in order to reduce the risk of splashback

when you're relieving yourself,

giving you the optimum angle for doing that.

The cost of using toilets like this was one penny

giving rise to the phrase, "Spend a penny".

'It was one of the most stable pricing structures

'Britain had ever seen.

'The going rate for using a public convenience

'remained one penny for over 100 years until decimalisation in 1971.'

Everywhere you look, there's an almost lavish level of detail,

the kind of thing you'd expect to find in a public space

like a church or a museum.

But, of course, by this time, toilets had gone public

and we see the civic dignitaries of Cardiff,

the great and the good of the city,

all wanting to lend their name to this project,

because this was a veritable temple of convenience.

Lovely as these toilets are,

for the majority of people in the country

the reality was far less glamorous.

Throughout Britain's industrial cities,

hundreds of thousands of people lived in houses like these -

'small one-up, one-down homes built around communal courtyards.

'They were known as "back to backs."'

By the end of the 19th century,

flush toilets were beginning to reach the masses.

Between them, Twyford, Crapper and Jennings

had more or less perfected the design.

Unfortunately, access to that design

was severely limited for the working classes.

There were 20,000 courtyards like this one here in Birmingham alone.

Now, in this particular one,

that meant 70 people sharing three toilets.

In the winter, they'd be cold, they'd be dark,

you might even have to queue for them.

As the level of hygiene,

that would depend entirely on the families that you were sharing with.

And, unfortunately, because the courtyard was also the place

where all these household stored their refuse,

as well as sharing with other families,

you'd be sharing these toilets with rats, cockroaches and spiders.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about these toilets is

for many people living in urban areas in Britain,

this was the reality of the toilet right up to the '60s and '70s.

'For a glimpse of what living with these shared toilets was like,

'I'm meeting Ann and Ted, who grew up in back to backs in the 1950s.'

How many families shared your toilet?

If you were lucky, you shared with one other family.

We shared with one other family.

We shared the toilet with three families.

But there was five of them sharing the courtyard.

As you had to share the facilities,

how did you share the cleaning of them?

Each lady had a day washing the brew house, or the wash house.

But when the water was finished with, it had two uses.

Sometimes it was just thrown out in the yard and the water was swept.

Another time, it was thrown at the toilet, so the toilet was clean.

So you could go up there, and there'd be a queue for that toilet.

And if it was raining, you went into the brew house,

waiting for the rain to finish.

But I always say to people,

"That's where the River Dance started," you know.

THEY CHUCKLE

Can you paint me a picture as it were, describe for me what it was really like?

At nights it would be dark.

There was no lights, no electric lights or no gas lights...

-Not even in the yard.

-No.

You'd take your friend or your brother or your sister to go out to the yard with you.

If it was really dark, you wouldn't go on your own

-with the rats running about.

-Right.

And we didn't realise that we were deprived. Well, you don't till afterwards.

-Do you?

-It was also a play area.

-Mmm.

For the children. And it was just another space within the complex.

We had this lady and, if you did anything wrong,

she'd always tell you off,

so we used to, when we knew she was going to the toilet,

nip on the roof at the top, it was a corrugated roof.

And you'd be dead quiet and she'd arrive at the toilet.

We knew... She'd shut the door,

we could hear her shuffling around

and then, we waited until we thought she was sitting down,

and then, we... (HE CLAPS) ..hit the roof

and that cures the constipation.

THEY LAUGH

Toilets had finally reached the masses

but, as we all got used to the privacy

of entering the boxed-off world of the toilet, something changed.

The paradox of the toilet is this -

as they became universally available,

an aura of secrecy grew up around what we actually did in them.

So we are in a state of collective denial

about what are completely natural functions.

We, we are embarrassed about it.

We employ a long list of washroom euphemisms.

We deflect our embarrassment with toilet humour.

The final proof of this absurdity is the Golden Poo Awards.

It's a night for toilet humour in Balham, in South London.

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

Which means you have ahead of you an unrelenting diet of shit jokes.

LAUGHTER

It's designed to get us all to think harder about toilets

and the unfortunate third of the world's population

who don't have access to proper sanitation.

Is there anyone... Have you had a shit today, sir?

-Not today, no.

-Ooh!

When did you last have one? Have you ever had one?

Eh... Oh, yes. Yeah, yeah.

What would your definition of toilet humour be then?

Well, I suppose is laughing at the fact that we shit

and, sometimes, at inappropriate times or...

Er... I'll tell you a joke my father used to tell.

A man goes to the doctor and he says, "Doctor, I'm shitting cubes."

And the doctor says, "Um, stand up, turn round."

And he sort of snips, snips, snips.

And he says, "You'll be all right now." The man says, "What have you done?"

He says, "I've cut three inches of the bottom of your string vest."

HE LAUGHS

Well, I don't know why that's funny, but it is.

It's probably just the sort of artifice of it.

Just shitting is funny, I'm afraid.

A man goes to the doctor with a bit of lettuce sticking out of his bottom.

The doctor says, "It's just the tip of the iceberg."

LAUGHTER

I mean... It's a taboo. It's up there with sex and death

to the extent that the toilet is something we do every day,

death is, well, hopefully, is not something you encounter too often.

Sex, although I have fond memories of it.

THEY CHUCKLE

You know.

It is a fundamental thing that we do,

and everyone does it and every animal does it.

And no-one, you know, everyone knows that everyone else does it.

And yet, we do not speak of it.

-It's the embarrassment.

-Yeah.

-It's like farting in the lift.

You know, farting.

I wonder, is farting funny in every culture?

I certainly doubt that it's so funny if you don't have a toilet,

if you have to, you know, if you have no facilities,

there's no sewage or... I'm guessing probably shit is not so funny.

Are there Indian toilet comedians, I wonder?

Well, you're doing the programme, not me. Find out.

THEY LAUGH

Different cultures have different ways of, you know,

dealing with their shit.

Er... you know, we sometimes encounter different things,

you know, squat toilets or...

Why are we so convinced that the foreigners are doing it wrong?

The French writer Rabelais,

he had a whole thing he wrote about the best way to wipe your arse.

And he concluded that it was a swan's neck.

THEY CHUCKLE

-Well, I have to say, if you're caught short in the country, sphagnum moss.

-Yeah?

It's better than toilet paper, so...

It's wet, it's absorbent, you know,

and you just sort of pull a bit off

and do the business and, you know, use it, put it back on,

you've kind of hardly even damaged the environment.

THEY LAUGH

'Arthur has set me thinking,

'if you don't have a ready supply of sphagnum moss,

'let alone a swan's neck,

'what is the best way to deal with cleaning yourself up?

'And has our society really settled

'on the most healthy and efficient way of going to the toilet?

'I'm meeting Dr Ron Cutler at Queen Mary University London,

'who, I hope, will shed some light on the perennial question -

'to wash or to wipe?'

If you wash your bottom with water,

you are using your hands

and, therefore, it becomes even more important

that you actually wash your hands afterwards.

That may act as a stimulus for people to wash their hands

but, then again, people being what they are, it may not.

So, basically, although your nether regions may be clean after that,

your hands may be not so clean.

As far as paper goes, there is a huge problem with paper.

Yes, it's an effective wiping agent,

but dry paper isn't a 100% useful

for removing faeces from a surface such a skin.

Now, the moist wipes work very effectively,

but, environmentally, they are not very good,

because they are not as easy to get rid of,

because the moist wipe has a stronger tensile strength

than ordinary toilet paper.

The bottom liner is, whatever,

however you manage to wipe your bottom,

you absolutely have to wash your hands afterwards,

even if you're using toilet paper, even if you're using wipes.

And I think it's a matter of preference, to be honest.

'So what exactly are we washing off our hands?

'Ron and his team are conducting a study of samples

'collected from various toilet sites to find out what we're up against.'

Well, here we are in the toilet, welcome to my world.

And this is a typical cubicle.

And we've been looking at places

-where you're actually going to find faecal flora, shall we say.

-Mm.

-And, not surprisingly, er...toilet handle.

-Right.

Door handle.

Even sometimes these dispensers.

What we do is we take a sterile swab

and we have a specific area that we sample on each one of the sites.

'Once collected, they grow the bacteria in their lab

'to discover what pathogens our hands

'might unintentionally be harbouring.'

So what can we expect to find growing in these dishes then?

Well, this is actually an MRSA.

-And it was isolated from a toilet.

-Really?

Not this toilet, but a toilet somewhere in our community.

It wasn't associated with a hospital,

it wasn't associated, as far as we know, with any patient

or the use of antibiotics in it.

It just happens to live there.

MRSA is something we tend to associate with super bugs

and hospitals and, you know,

not something we perhaps expect to find in a toilet.

There are two types of MRSA - one is a hospital MRSA

and the other one is a community MRSA.

The community MRSA is a huge problem in America at the moment

because it's going through schools.

We were fortunate because the community strain

seemed to leapfrog over us.

It's now in India and in some parts of Europe.

But it does exist in this country.

And they are methicillin-resistant, drug-resistant organisms

and they will cause disease.

So it's not really surprising we find them in public toilets.

-So it's more important than ever to...

-Wash your hands.

Different cultures have different habits,

I'm thinking perhaps of sitting versus squatting.

From a hygiene point of view, is one better than the other?

Well, basically, I think that, in the past,

why would people develop a sitting toilet?

It's probably because it's more comfortable than squatting.

And it's easier to cut down on the smell.

The other way is, potentially, more hygienic,

because it doesn't have anything in between you and the sewage,

but it also has problems with potentially having to smell.

'So it seems that most of our cultural habits are healthy enough

'as long as we follow the basic rules of hygiene.

'But these habits are not as deeply rooted as you might imagine.

'Take Japan as an example.

'70 years ago, the Japanese only used squat toilets,

'but, during the American occupation after World War Two,

'they fell in love with sit-down loos, which are now the norm.

'When it comes to hygiene, the Japanese can lay claim

'to some of the cleanest toilets known to man.

'And though they adopted western toilets relatively recently,

'they've developed the design with an almost fetish-like obsession.

'They seem determined to have the best sit-down loos in the world

'with technology catering for your every need

'at the press of a button.'

The controls on this toilet

may seem at first sight a little bit complicated

but, by Japanese standards,

this one is quite simple.

And toilets like this are the norm,

not just here in hotels and in houses

but in stores, stations, all kinds of places.

So it's got a heated seat,

to get your bottom warm,

And it's also got this, it's got a...

You can control the temperature here, make it warmer or colder.

This one controls the level of the spray.

For you to wash yourself afterwards instead of wipe yourself down.

If I cover this sensor here,

which should be masked by my bottom,

something seems to be happening,

and I press this here.

It comes out here and... Oops, sorry!

And it washes...

It goes right up your back passage, clean it out.

It took me a...

a few days to...to pluck up the courage to even use it

when I came here, but now,

I could get used to it.

However, this isn't just a story about technology.

Even in quite simple toilets,

like these I came across in the back of a cafe,

the Japanese like to have fun and do something different.

This toilet is incredible.

Everything in here is a found object,

but the best bit is when you sit down...

BIRDS SINGING

..and the birds begin to sing.

This desire for the perfect toilet

seems to reflect something which runs quite deep in Japanese society.

This is an extract from an essay on architecture

written in the 1930s by Junichiro Tanizaki.

"Anyone with a taste for traditional architecture

"must agree that the Japanese toilet is perfection.

"I love to listen from such a toilet to the sound of softly falling rain.

"There one can listen with such a sense of intimacy

"to the raindrops falling from the eves and the trees,

"seeping into the earth as they wash over the base of a stone lantern

"and freshen the moss about the stepping stones.

"The toilet is the perfect place to listen to the chirping of insects

"or the song of birds,

"to view the moon, or to enjoy any of those poignant moments

"that mark the change of the seasons.

"Indeed, one could claim that,

"of all the elements of Japanese architecture,

"the toilet is the most aesthetic."

'Japanese culture, it seems, prices order and beauty above all else,

'even in the tiniest of details, be that a perfect cherry blossom,

'a tranquil Japanese garden

'or a spotless public toilet.

'I want to try and understand

'how this obsessive search for order and beauty

'even extends into toilet design,

'so I'm meeting Japanese architect Junko Kobayashi.

'Her Tokyo practice specialises in designing public toilets,

'and, fittingly, her office is next to a shrine

'complete with its own purification area.'

Japanese architecture seems to value serenity.

We can see it here in this shrine.

Is that something that you try and bring into your own approach to design?

SHE SPEAKS JAPANESE

TRANSLATED: Personally, I like simplicity and calmness,

but, at the same time,

I like to have fun and be surrounded by cheerful things.

I like serenity but, professionally, when I design toilets,

I design them for a specific location and context.

So I am not typically conscious of trying to make a calm space.

Usually you partially remove your clothes to sit on the loo,

so you do not have much freedom to move around.

Therefore, everything has to be within reach of the toilet seat,

which is why I have compared the toilet to an aeroplane cockpit.

You are in a small room and I want to create a high-tech

and easy to use toilet in a compact space.

Many Japanese people are so fastidious

they are embarrassed by the sound of their bodily functions.

But even that is catered for on this toilet here

with the Sound Princes.

FLUSHING SOUND

With the aid of this sound effect,

they can mask the sound of themselves peeing.

But, actually, it's not such a newfangled idea as it might sound,

because in the Edo Period, Japanese princesses,

when they went to the toilet,

would have their servants stand outside with jugs of water

which they would pour in order to mask the sound of the princess.

TRANSLATED: Japanese people are very sensitive and easily embarrassed.

We feel ashamed when people can hear the sounds we make

as we do our business.

If the person in the next cubicle can hear you, it is very embarrassing,

and we flush the toilet repeatedly to mask the sounds we make.

It was because of this that toilet manufacturers

came up with the products to do this.

They have been around for 25 years now,

but do we really need such innovations?

After the recent earthquake and tsunami,

I heard that in the affected area

there was no water to flush the toilets,

and so, people felt that they had to hold it in and so, got sick.

Maybe we should be rethinking our reliance on high-tech flush loos.

Spending time here makes you understand

how a country's toilet habits

reveal something far deeper about their cultural outlook.

'But Jenko's comments about water use and resources

'have also set me wondering.

'Will people in the emerging economies like China and India

'soon be expecting the delights of an electric flushing loo

'complete with Sound Princess,

'or will they be forced to find an alternative solution?

'To find out, I joined the throng of excited delegates

'at the 11th World Toilet Summit.

'It's perhaps one of the most unlikely topics for a world conference,

'but this year it's proudly hosted

'by China's south tropical island of Hainan.

'It turns out that the Japanese are not the only ones

'craving a bit of bling in their bathrooms.

'But, although this unlikely gathering

'appears to celebrate the western flush,

'there is actually a serious purpose to this conference.

'That is the search for a toilet solution

'that's far less of a drain on the world's resources.'

Let's start talking about toilets in Africa.

This conference is the brainchild

of Singapore businessman and philanthropist Jack Sim,

who set up the World Toilet Organisation

once he realised the scale of human tragedy

caused by not having toilets.

40% of the world population,

about 2.6 billion people,

still do not have access to a proper toilet.

And open defecation pollutes the river, they are drinking water,

there are leaks and also spread diseases

to the scale of 1.5 million children dying of diarrhoea every year.

That is more death of children

than measles, HIV and malaria added up together.

And all because we have neglected the subject,

so turning toilet to humour,

I think start to change the game

and people are now engaged in this subject.

We see a lot of UN agencies and companies

paying attention to this too.

I think we are on the up trend.

'With poor sanitation contributing to so many deaths,

'this conference has a massive task on its hands.'

INTERPRETER: Public and private partnerships must work together

to make good hygiene practice a shared responsibility.

HE SPEAKS IN HIS OWN LANGUAGE

INTERPRETER: In the users comfort and safety...

We also suggest that we create

an international toilet monitoring centre.

'But as I listen to the speeches,

'I wonder whether I am hearing any ideas

'that come close to addressing this massive problem.'

Smell is the key thing that people complain about.

This conference has certainly brought it home to me

that there's another dimension to the story of the toilet

that we just hadn't seen yet,

i.e. the huge problems faced by the developing world.

'How do you bring sanitation to 2.6 billion people?

'Not many of the ideas on offer at this conference seem big enough

'to make much of a dent in a problem of that magnitude.

'So I'm heading for the Indian subcontinent,

'and a country in the throws of a toilet revolution.

'This is Bangladesh,

'a country struggling to bring modern sanitation

'to its population.'

Millions of people in Bangladesh today still have no access

to toilets of any kind, so they're compelled to practise

what it's delicately referred to as "open defecation"

or, to put it more bluntly, shitting at the side of the road.

The kids in this village play amongst raw sewage.

It ends up on their hands and bare feet;

it gets walked into their homes;

it pollutes the pond where they swim and wash.

Flies transport it from house to house,

from plate to plate.

It's not hard to see why conditions like these

cause so much disease and death.

However, there are moves afoot

to revolutionise the provision of toilets.

A scheme called The Wash Programme has been set up in 150 districts,

home to some 40 million people.

The first goal of this scheme is to supply the necessary hardware.

This is a Bangladesh toilet factory

and this is a flushing toilet

at its most simple.

You dig a hole in the ground, you set the concrete rings in the hole,

that stops the sides of the hole from falling in.

Then you place this concrete slab on top of the hole to cap it off.

You've got your foot rest here and this funnel arrangement.

Here's one that hasn't been set in concrete

that channels your waste down into the hole.

Now, that in itself is just a sophisticated hole in the ground,

because there would be absolutely nothing

to stop the flies from going into the pit

and the smells from coming out.

But what transforms it into a flushing toilet is this.

Now then, the addition of this water trap here

means that, when you flush the waste down here,

sufficient water has to be used

to drive the waste out and over the trap here,

but, once that's happened, you have clean water in here,

which prevents the smell from getting out

and the flies from getting in.

So, for the princely sum of 15 taka, or about 12p,

you can transform a hole in the ground into a flushing toilet.

The toilet is flushed with a small bucket of water,

so they are easy to install with no need for extra plumbing.

To build a toilet, you need six concrete rings.

It's a twin-pit design.

You put three of the rings to form a hole here.

When that's full, you move the toilet slab to here,

you move the toilet superstructure to here

and you cap that off and leave it to compost.

And this one, as you can see, is now operational.

The whole thing costs 2,000 taka.

That's for six rings, a cap, a toilet slab, the superstructure...

That is the princely sum of 17 quid.

Now, they've sold five million of these all across Bangladesh,

and, assuming five uses per toilet,

that means 25 million Bangladeshis

now have access to adequate sanitary provision for the first time.

And the remarkable thing is that has happened during the last four years.

But there is no point making cheap toilets available

if no-one wants to buy them.

You also need to start changing people's habits.

'So, in villages throughout the country,

'sanitation committees have been established.

'The first thing these committees do is find out

'where everyone in the village currently goes to the toilet.

'And then, put the information onto a big map.'

-This...

-This one has the trap, yeah?

-No trap here.

-OK.

'This simple act of mapping sanitary provision

'gets people to start thinking about how much raw sewage

'there might be lying around their village.

'It makes people realise that, without proper toilets,

'they're all basically ingesting

'their neighbour's excrement on a daily basis

'and toilets quickly start springing up around the village.'

HE SPEAKS IN HIS OWN LANGUAGE

'It has proved a potent strategy

'and explains why things are changing so quickly.

'So the problem of rural sanitation does seem to be improving.

'But that is only half the story.'

This is Dhaka. This is one of the fastest-growing cities in the world.

The population is set to hit over 20 million by 2015.

As people pour into this city,

a lot of them live in informal settlements,

like the one we can see behind us, that's called Korail.

They're so pushed to space over there

that they are dumping rubbish into the lake

to expand the room that they can build on.

This slum sits next to the richest area of Dhaka.

'It's home to low-paid workers drawn by the possibility of work

'in the surrounding homes and offices.

'I've also been told that this place

'is home to some of the worst types of toilet.

'Simple platforms built on stilts known as "hanging toilets."'

HE BREATHES IN AND SIGHS

This is sanitation at its most basic.

It drops down through that hole there into the lake

and, of course, because it's a lake, it's not a moving body of water,

there's nothing to flush it away.

And, in fact, the level of lake is so low at the moment,

it doesn't even seem to be dropping into the water even.

HE SIGHS

And this is, this is sanitary reality

for a lot of people living here.

It's one of the biggest slums in Bangladesh.

But, unfortunately, because it's an unofficial slum,

i.e., effectively, they're squatting,

of course, there's no security of tenure,

so people are unwilling to invest in something

that might be swept away at a moments notice

at the whim of the landlord.

The locals tell me that some of these hanging toilets

have been here for over 20 years.

And with newcomers constantly pouring in from the countryside,

it's hard to see them disappearing any time soon.

Providing toilets for the urban poor is not as simple as it might seem.

For a start, the scale of the problem is just so much bigger.

Secondly, the urban population is so much more transient.

You could map the slums of Dhaka today,

but that map would be out of date within months, if not within weeks.

You could elect a Village Wash Committee

or, at least, an Area Wash Committee,

but will the people serving on it

still be living in the area a few weeks or a few months later?

They might have gone back to the countryside

or got a better place in Dhaka.

So to adapt The Wash Programme to the urban areas

is going to be a big challenge.

When London faced these problems in the 1850s,

the mains sewers were installed,

but Bangladesh simply doesn't have the money

for engineering works on that scale,

and, even if they did, the amount of water required to run it

would be completely unsustainable.

It's a challenge that is drawing in the big guns.

One major donor to the cause is the Bill And Melinda Gates Foundation.

They are supporting sanitation programmes throughout the region.

But, perhaps because of their background in the computer industry,

they are also thinking about a far more radical solution

to the sanitation problem the planet faces.

They have set themselves the task

of changing the way that everyone in the world goes to the toilet.

I mean, the toilet is the greatest innovation

that has saved more lives than any other.

Come on, it was developed in 1775,

I mean, we should have come up with something smarter than that.

In fact, isn't it crazy that we use drinking water

and then use it as a transport medium through very expensive pipes

to a place where we spend a lot more energy to get the waste out.

So we are saying - can't we have modern engineering,

chemical engineering, biology, we don't really care,

that comes up with a completely different solution that says,

"Look, this is waste, but there's a lot of energy in it."

Fertilisers, nutrients, can we recover them,

use that to pay for the process

and make it safe and pleasant to use?

So that's why we say we want to develop the cellphone of sanitation.

So we sat down with a few scientific advisers, visionary people,

and we dreamt up the reinvented toilet.

This little black box that would be independent of water, sewer and electricity,

that would be pleasant to use, would turn your shit into energy,

use the energy in that to power the system

and we wrote that down as the specs and said,

"Look, that's the toilet we want."

And we sent that to 22 universities and said, "Can you make it?"

So is such a revolutionary toilet possible?

I'm at Delft University in Holland.

'They've taken up the challenge of reinventing the toilet

'and are working on a machine that will atomise excrement

'and use the gases produced to create electricity.'

So what do we have here?

This doesn't look much like a toilet.

-No, that's correct, it's an industrial microwave.

-Right.

Something we might have at home,

with a door where you put your food in.

OK. So what do you do with the microwaves?

What we are going to do with the microwaves

is basically generate plasma.

Plasma is a really hot gas, ionized gas,

that can destroy anything it reaches.

With the plasma, we will gasify the faecal matter.

If we obtain a really high-quality gas,

we can obtain enough energy to make this work.

So the microwaves pass through the faecal matter,

that generates plasma, this ionised, extremely hot gas,

and then you use that then to generate electricity

and you use the electricity to power the microwave.

Yeah, if the research works as we hope it does, yeah, we will.

So just add shit.

THEY LAUGH

'The team have got some footage of their machine in action.

'They hope that, in the future, rather than flush your faeces away,

'it will generate a reaction like this within your toilet.

'So there is a chance that, in the not too far distant future,

'we'll all be pooing into a machine

'that creates its own energy from organic waste,

'just like the time travelling car in Back To The Future.

'Who said toilets can't be fun?'

We are only satisfied when millions of people use these solutions.

We want to have a solution that can spread virally, go like wildfire.

So within three to five years, I think,

we should have toilets that people can use.

And five to ten years, we want to see millions of people use.

That's our goal, frankly.

'After 150 years, it seems that the flushing toilet

'is at last facing a serious threat to its dominance.

'Perhaps the future is a waterless box that creates energy

'every time you add poo.

'But until that future arrives,

'I've got one final toilet to go and see.'

When I started on my journey,

a friend said that I should visit an alternative community

out on the LLeyn Peninsula, near my home in North Wales.

Apparently, they have a solution

'to the age-old problem of dealing with waste

'that is safe, odour free and doesn't use any water.'

-Hello, sut wyt ti?

-Ifor, welcome to Felin Uchaf Centre.

-Thank you very much indeed.

-And welcome to our compost toilet.

-Well, how does it work?

-Well, come on in and have a look.

-OK.

All right. It looks quite ordinary!

All the elements you'd expect to find

in a conventional public toilet are here.

We've got the seat, we've got the urinal and, basically,

what...how it works is that when you lift it,

-you notice that it doesn't have the flush.

-Right.

It just has a hole down to the concrete chamber beneath us.

-It doesn't smell, no.

-No.

-No, because the microbial activities are already taking place there.

-Right.

So it's dry compost that's down there

and compost because it's sewage mixed

with a dry material like this sawdust here.

-So that's you flushing away.

-So that's the flush.

-So you'd add a handful of that every time you used it.

-OK.

That sort of soaks up any of the moisture and helps the composting,

And it's ripe for taking up and taking onto the garden.

Well-rotted, it should be by now, we'll find out, shall we?

-Come on then.

-Right.

-Let's get the spade.

'My journey has taken me all round the world

'in search of the perfect toilet

'and helped me understand

'that the way we deal with our excrement shapes who we are.

'But, after travelling all that way,

'I'm back where I started -

'in rural Wales sprinkling a handful of dust on my business.

'It seems my uncle and aunt were on to something all along.

'This really doesn't smell

'and there are no flies!

'I'm very glad I don't have to use a hanging toilet

'in the slums of Dhaka.

'I'd love to have a Japanese toilet with heated seat

'and built-in cleaning system.

'And I look forward to the day

'my loo creates instant energy for my home.

'But, until then, I quite like the honesty

'of taking a barrow load of well-rotted shit

'to spread around the base of a tree,

'completing that age-old cycle of dung to life.'

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd