So who watched this
then?!
In case you don't know
what I'm talking about, their was a 6 part series shown on BBC 2
shown on successive Monday's revealing what goes behind the scenes
on the London Underground, and it's many employees from the many departments in the company.
Filmed over I think, a
period of around 6 months last year, Each episode shown had a
different theme attached to it, on such issues such as fare dodgers
and what happens when you don't pay, The life of a commuter and the
jobs that people do on the network after the last train has gone. I.e during when
most of London is asleep. Although these themes were predominately
featured in their specific episode, there were parts in the episodes
where they would cut to something entirely different, which I suppose
is to keep episode fresh and to ensure the viewer doesn't switch off.
I for one enjoyed this,
partly because as I don't live in the city, and partly, because I
like programs that film the behind the scenes stuff that us public
don't see. Because of the former, whenever a station was mentioned
by the narrator (Julian Barrett, from Mighty Boosh fame) or a station
sign being seen on screen, I immediately paused the programme, and
started to look for it on the tube I had in a separate window! Call
me geeky, but I wanted to know where x station was and on what line
of the tube network! Of course I know about the well known ones, but
I didn't exactly know where, say Hainault was (central line, nr
Chigwell), Chesham (North west of the Metropolitan line, in it's own
special zone!) or Ladbroke Grove (circle line, a few miles north of
Shepherds Bush, West London)
There's just something
about it that fascinates me, probably because of the frequency of
trains during the day, and the fact that there are so many stations,
depending where you live, you're never far from a station (I realised
this on a visit in February, a friend of mine is around 20 minutes
walk from his nearest station in the south, and is a similar sort
of distance for my cousin and his fiancée where they live in North
London). Totally different to where I live, where there is a bus service during the day and on Fridays and Saturdays, and evening service from 7.00 pm.
If you've not seen it,
and don't have anything planned this weekend, I suggest you watch
them all on Iplayer, you have until next Monday 11 pm!
Further reading:
Tube Exits app, inventor featured on episode 6
good blog on the underground network
Digital spy thread on the Series
another London Underground blog
And if you're on twitter, here's the hashtag results
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