we seem to have challenged each other to a kind of competition, he thinks of a task for my to do and when I've done it I throw one back at him. Quite fun and good way to learn I thought?
That's the purpose of out CHALLENGES forum. Want some good challenges, take part in one of ours. 
What you're trying to do can't be done. When you apply a shader to geometry, it applies it to both sides of it. In the case of a plane, both sides will have the same shader applied to it. Thus, if you have text in the texture, it will read normal on one side but reversed on the other. That's just the way Maya works. You could go the route of what Mike said and create a very thin cube. That way, it will have two physical sides instead of one and you can apply two different shaders to each side.
Dave Baer
Professor of Digital Arts
Digital Media Arts College
Boca Raton, Florida
dbaer@dmac.edu