Nick and Margaret: The Trouble With Our Trains, TV review: Our train system is even dafter than the daftest Apprentice candidate

Lord Sugar's former Apprentice henchmen took a forensic look at the British railway system in the BBC programme

Platform for debate: Nick Hewer and Margaret Mountford in ‘The Trouble with Our Trains’ (BBC)

Here's a conundrum: whose fault is it if a train runs into a rogue peacock? Is it Network Rail, which is responsible for the track? Or one of the 28 mostly privately run train-operating companies? The answer, ridiculously, depends on the size of the bird: if it's large – dimensions unspecified – Network Rail is culpable. And if it's a smaller feathered creature, the train company foots the bill. A peacock counts as a large specimen. Sorry, Network Rail.

That was the kind of nitty-gritty that Lord Sugar's former Apprentice henchmen, Margaret Mountford and Nick Hewer, tackled in this forensic look at the British railway system, which, if I'm honest, felt a bit heavy going the week before the election.

The pair have previously teamed up for programmes on benefits, retirement age and immigration, and you can't fault their research. To find out about "peacockgate", Mountford, a former lawyer, trawled through "The Delay Attribution" guide, detailing 250 possible reasons for lateness.

They jumped aboard some of the busiest and tardiest services and showed that the operating companies were not the problem, necessarily. It was the complex web of Network Rail, rolling-stock companies and the Department for Transport that combined to leave us with services like Southern's "Train of Shame", the 7.29am from Brighton to London, late every day last year.

The admirable – if not slightly terrifying (well, Mountford, anyway) – duo hunted down transport heads to demand answers and dole out the withering looks we've previously seen reserved for the most idiotic of slick-haired Apprentice candidates.

"Whatever system we had, whoever ran it, they'd still have to take decisions as what to spend money on and we'd still have the same Victorian infrastructure and the same over-crowded railway" was Mountford's bleak denouement. Whoever comes to power this time next week, take note.