The Tube: Going Underground, Channel 5 - TV review: We were clearly supposed to cheer the staff and boo the public

Apparently, some trains are so old that replacement parts are bought on eBay

On track: Piccadilly Line boss Charlotte was impressive in‘The Tube: Going Underground’

If anyone got a sense of déjà vu watching the opener of this series following London Underground's staff, it could be because the same production company made a very similar offering aired on BBC2. Whereas 2012's The Tube managed to appeal beyond people that use the capital's over 150-year-old transport system, I'm not sure this offered much for non-Tube-going viewers.

Take-the-cameras-to-work is a much-used genre. But to care about the fishermen/ice-road truckers/hotel staff/whatever, there needs to be some decent characters to draw you in. In this, we weren't with anyone long enough for them to care much. I would like to see more of Piccadilly Line boss Charlotte, whose ability to keep the “The Pic” running from a control room that looked more like an Eighties imagining of the inside of a spaceship than the hub of a modern transport network, was impressive.

The reason everything looked old is because it is, as we were told repeatedly. Some trains are pushing 40, so decrepit that when bits fall off, engineers have to turn to eBay to source the parts, apparently. I was surprised by the loyalty some of these workers felt to “The Firm”. Driver Keith said he had never imagined doing anything else: “From Whitehaven, traditionally a mining town, go down the pits, go down the Tube. It's a big black hole – what's the difference?”

We were clearly supposed to cheer the staff and boo the public, and these guys put up with a lot of obnoxiousness. We saw them trying to implement an all-standing method on the escalators. “Commuters do not like change,” said one worker. Understatement of the year as passengers blithely refused to co-operate and gave out some choice words as they kept moving. The farcical element wasn't helped by the fact that mockumentaries like the brilliant W1A have nailed that narration tone that tries very hard to make the minutiae of someone's working day into a camera-worthy moment. It was hard to listen to this without feeling like everything was tongue-in-cheek. The standing-only experiment was decreed a success. We'll have to see how that one pans out.