The daily commute is a great time to get really close to your fellow Londoners as proved in claustrophobic new documentary The Tube: Going Underground, which starts on Channel 5 tonight.
Filmed over one year during work on a £10bn modernisation programme, the series makes you appreciate how hard running the world’s oldest underground transport system really is: what with Friday night drunks, football fans converging for a London derby, strike action and an epidemic of flat wheels and other technical troubles.
There's also analysis of less familiar aspects such as the controversial experiment in Holborn to abandon the ‘walk on the left’ convention.
It all makes you appreciate just how close to crisis the system nearly always is and how miraculous getting across town from home to work in time for the Monday morning meeting can be.
The Tube: Going Underground is on Channel 5 on 21 March at 9pm.