BBC2 documentary series on the London Underground

It's on Monday nights at 9pm for the next few weeks.

I watched the first broadcast a couple of days ago and was pleasantly surprised at the comparatively realistic footage of events on the gatelines/platforms of Liverpool Street and Leicester Square stations in particular. Drunks, lunatics, homicidal maniacs, cretins...most were at least represented.

It's true that the staff, obviously aware of the presence of the camera crews, were on their best behaviour and their near-saintly forbearance in the face of absolutely unacceptable behaviour was slightly jarring- but , even so, it was a fairly reasonable picture of what we've got to endure on a daily basis.

If you want a (partial) insight into my working life, watch the series.

Some sad insights:

The interview with a Russian (?) station cleaner in her late 20's who had trained as an athlete in her youth and therefore had no other transferrable career skills...so she'd ended up as an LU cleaner.

Before coming to the UK, her impressions of the country had been formed by 'Upstairs, Downstairs' (reticent, polite people), so nothing had prepared her for cleaning up their mess: urine, shit, vomit, blood, sperm etc (each bodily product has a designated cleaning code-word and procedure).

All this is in my book, in the chapter entitled "The Hell of Excrement".