There she held the influential posts of Commissioning Editor for Youth Programmes and Head of Independent Commissioning for Entertainment but was always denied

There, she held the influential posts of Commissioning Editor for Youth Programmes and Head of Independent Commissioning for Entertainment, but was always denied the job she most craved - the controllership of BBC2. Not for nothing did she launch her now-notorious attack on the M-people - "male, middle-class, middle-aged, mediocre" - at the Edinburgh Festival in 1995.She elaborates on the male conspiracy theory in A Night in with the Girls, a BBC documentary charting the history of women in TV, to be broadcast next week. "The reason I left the BBC was because I didn't think I was going anywhere," she explains. "Why are there now more men running the BBC than there were when I left? John Birt said half the BBC's staff was going to be female by the year 2000 He may have meant it, but other people are not executing it. You can't tell me it wouldn't be possible to have a woman running BBC2. If you're a woman, to get on you have to have a sense of humour that men don't need to have.

They just have that funny `men' way of talking to each other - although a lot of them still seem to have problems communicating."Perhaps unsurprisingly, having left L!ve TV in 1995 after alleged clashes with executives there, Street- Porter says she is "not rushing back to being a TV executive I like doing more creative things now I can't see the point to the TV executive existence anymore I did it for nine years, and at the end, you're not thanked. You're completely replaceable, a cog."To her eclectic CV - TV exec, chat-show host, film producer, President of the Ramblers' Association - can now be added "architectural presenter". She brings to this task what she brings to everything - immense enthusiasm. "I wanted to make a programme that was fun and showed architecture as something living, not dead," she declares. "There are a lot of architecture programmes that blind you with the history of buildings.

When I was at the BBC, I was in violent disagreement with the bended-knee position. Buildings reflect the spirit of the age and people's madness. Having built my own house, I know you have to be mad to do it. With this series, I've tried to celebrate the folly of it."She is certainly a persuasive presenter. "I like her directness," opines Jamie Muir, the series producer of Travels with Pevsner.

"She'll always have a future as a presenter because she's wonderfully direct. She has a straightforward enjoyment of things and an approachability. After all that business with L!ve TV, it was also nice to show that other side of her, the softer, funnier side. People who know her know she is an extremely funny woman."All this will come as a surprise to her detractors in the business, the types who are always quoted unattributably as they sink the knife between her shoulder-blades.

But she should be used to abuse by now - it's trailed her ever since she made her television debut as a presenter of the London Weekend Show in 1975. A towering six-footer with prominent teeth and an even more prominent penchant for loud clothes, she has never failed to catch the eye. She also has a reputation for being difficult, which she does nothing to deny. "I don't suffer fools, and was very demanding as an executive," she admits. "I probably was difficult to work with, but so are most blokes."It is the Estuary accent, however, that critics have most frequently latched onto.