Presented by Tim Dunn & Siddy Holloway
Country of origin United Kingdom
No. of series 3
No. of episodes 26
Production
Executive producer Rob Dersley
Running time 44 minutes
Production company Brown Bob Productions
Original release
Network Yesterday / UKTV Release 19 July 2021 – present
Neil Gaiman has amassed a huge body of work over the past 40 years, and is considered Britain’s greatest fantasist of our era. You can spark strong intellectual debate over what is his best, or most loved work, but my personal favorite is a book that often gets lost in the shuffle: Neverwhere. It’s a novel about secret kingdoms and a vast civilization that lives under the streets of London in the abandoned and lost sections of the Tube. That has particular appeal to me, and here’s why.
Living in London in the fifties, we lived out at the West End, in Putney. Dad was working days, doing yo-ho-blow-the-man-down stuff at the Admiralty, and all the good markets and movie houses and the like were in the main city proper. So if Mom wanted to do shopping or browsing or treat us to a movie, lacking a car or the funds for a taxi, she had two choices: ride the bus, or take the Tube.
As for taking the bus, I presented a problem. There was no way I was going to endure the shame and disgrace of riding in the basement of the bus. I wanted to be up top, where I could marvel at the sight of pigeons flying beneath my line-of-sight against the glorious boiled-liver backdrop of post-war London.
For Mom, that would mean navigating the preposterously tight coiled steps at the back of the bus while carrying my brother who wasn’t ready for steep metal steps, and carrying one or two sacks of groceries. Also, boiled-liver London just wasn’t that exciting for her. My school uniform was that same color, but it had gold piping so I would stand out.
The Tube was the alternative. It was out of the rain, and while it was unlikely the air quality was any better down there, at least you couldn’t SEE the sulphur dioxide stew. And the London Underground authorities boasted that it was a constant 60 degrees on the platforms. Even Buckingham Palace didn’t have central heating then, and Londoners considered 60 degrees to be ideal room temperature. And in winter, that was savannah-like compared to up top.
So the Tube it was. Warmer, dryer, only the gap to mind, and outside of rush hours, getting a seat was all but assured. This being London when manners mattered, a woman burdened with two young children was going to get a seat no matter what. And in rush hour, she could entertain the thin hope that one or both of us would scamper off into the forest of adult legs, never to be seen again.
I quickly fell in love with the Tube. The magnificent dome roofed red carriages with the big windows and those amazing sliding doors. The way the trains fit the tunnels nearly exactly, the rush of air as a train emerged from the tunnel.
You might think that going through tunnels, there wouldn’t be much to see. But that’s not true. The walls of the tunnel were so near that even though the train might only be trundling along at 25 or 30 miles an hour (still faster than any double-decker could manage in London traffic) things would flash past, flickered by the lights through the train windows, making it feel like you were racing along at hundreds of miles an hour. The endless conduits, the access ports, the changes from steel to concrete tunnels all made for a dark strobing kaleidoscope.
Platforms were a blinding surprise, light and color and activity bursting like fireworks. Except for the … other platforms.
I would be watching the tunnel flicker-flash past, and suddenly it would vanish, replaced by a dark openness. Eyes already accustomed to the relative darkness of the tunnel, I could make out a platform, dark, empty, clearly disused and abandoned. Even more mysteriously, some would have one or two dim lights, suggesting that they were still part of the system. In the rapidly moving shadows cast by the carriage, I could make out objects that seemed to be moving. A couple of times I thought I could see people.
The idea fired my imagination. Were there people living down here? What did they eat? Where did they sleep? Were they friendly and carefree folk like the hobbits, or were they Morlocks? Clearly, the Tube had fascinating secrets.
Which is exactly why, many years later, Gaiman’s Neverwhere fascinated me. Did he also ride the Tube as a child, and see the same things and have similar wonderments?
Now, there is a purpose behind this long, meandering Grandpa Simpson discourse, and that’s to discuss a documentary series, Secrets of the London Underground that is airing on UKTV.
The series recently wrapped up its third season, 26 episodes in all. It’s hosted by two twenty-something presenters, Tim Dunn and Siddy Holloway. Siddy might seem an odd name, but she was born as Sigurbjörg Alma Ingólfsdóttir. Iceland has underground elves, but not much by way of underground trains, and I would love to hear how she wound up presenting on this program.
They are chirpy, happy, excited, and literally clap their hands in anticipation of the next great adventure in the Underground. In the normal course of events, a viewer might desperately hope by the third episode that they would both bend over and lick the live rail and put us out of our misery. Four hundred volts. That ought to do the job.
But the fact is that Tim and Siddy are both immensely likable, and their enthusiastic nerdgasms over the wonders they uncover are totally unfeigned. The Tube, to put it in a phrase, is a marvel.
The Tube has no end of secrets and mysteries. First opened in 1863, the first trains were pulled by specially-designed steam locomotives. At present, there are 272 stations in operation and about 130 that have been closed or, more intriguingly, never opened. Legend speaks of 16 stations the London Underground itself doesn’t know about, and there are dozens more fictional stations from literature and mass media. There’s about 260 miles of track.
The engineering, maintenance and logistical challenges are amazing in and of themselves. Some of the main stations have trains arriving every two minutes at peak hours. There’s hundreds of thousand of miles of conduits and relays, massive ventilation systems, and a vast computerized network to ensure speed and efficiency and safety. London Underground offers refunds if your train is more than fifteen minutes late.
A Guardian article recently detailed a unique problem a new line through the heart of London posed. The new tunnel was about 100 yards from the tower of Parliament that holds Big Ben, and digging in the moist clay soil had to be done with a minimum of noise and vibration, lest Big Ben topple and coming crashing down on them. Oh, the embarrassment.
Tim and Siddy love to explore the hidden parts of the system, where the vents and the generators and other unexpected items lie. There are old barracks from the war that speak volumes of the huge role the underground played during the Blitz and in the rest of the war.
The artistic and aesthetic touches are astonishing. Each station has its own color scheme in the tiling, and the architecture of the stations is often amazing, from Victorian to Art Deco to Post Modern. The red curved tiling of the station structures is as emblematic of London as the Tower Bridge.
The posters that adorn the stations were created by some of the greatest artists and graphic designers Britain had to offer, and in disused portions, old posters for plays from the 1920s or movies from the 1950s still hang.
The history of the Tube could fill volumes, and actually does fill a huge museum at Acton, just a mile from where I lived. (Drat! If only I knew…) Its incalculable contribution to London life, from being a great social equalizer in the 19th century to opening up opportunities in the early 20th to saving the lives of countless Londoners in the war is covered lovingly in this series. It really is an eighth wonder of the world.
And it’s also part of the future. The new Elizabeth Line is absolute 21st century state of the art, and even the platforms have sliding doors that the computer driven trains match up with perfectly. Far less noise and dust, and impossible for anyone to fall onto the tracks.
Even if you know nothing of London and pronounce Thames the way its spelled, and never thought about Subways other than for somewhat edible sandwiches, this show is both unexpectedly entertaining and engrossing, even if you weren’t a wonder-filled child hurtling through the neverwhere of London. For American viewers, subtitles might be handy. While Tim and Siddy are perfectly intelligible, some of the Tube workers they interview sound like extras from the old Carry On movies. They say there are 1200 different languages spoken in London, and 800 of them are English.
I expect there will be a fourth season, at least. What of the 1840 hyperloop, ten miles long, that sent an unmanned carriage through at the then-unheard-of speed of 65 miles an hour? Yes, 170 years before Elon Musk “thought of it.” A pity that cast-iron tunnels with real rubber gaskets weren’t up to the task. Perhaps with modern materials…
Is there a vast Knightsbridge dark market? What of the Angel Islington? Gaiman isn’t saying. Perhaps he saw them himself.
You might want to add going to London and riding the Tube to your bucket list after seeing this.
Viewable here: https://uktvplay.co.uk/ways-to-watch/