Judgement Day

The other favoured excuse for making commuters lives a misery is ‘signal failure’. In London, together with lousy maintenance, it has lead to, well, in many people’s minds, bloody manslaughter. Do the google on those rail accidents: Paddington, Hatfield, I shan’t go on. But in a way I should. Drudging home through the underground tonight, the public address announcements begin to resemble a Rauschenberg sound sculpture. Though most of the lines are crap today, each one is special to us, and each has its peculiarities. Sounds like the politically correct dregs of a dating service. “There’s a good service on all other lines.” Meaning, you’ve lost a couple of limbs but you’re still alive so why are you complaining you f***ing git! My sound sculpture got a round of applause the other day from the bulging fuming platform of commuters as I admonished the powers that be for their appalling service. I must be doing something right.


And then I started thinking of Noam Chomsky. The US government hated him. (I like America, by the way. Well a lot more than I like Britain.) Hated him for showing the public that a lot of the information is already there and publicly available if you so choose to accept the assignment of knowledge rather than ignorance. The allegations of the bribes and kickbacks to complete some of the new Jubilee line are, I admit, a little more nebulous. And of course the court proceedings against the companies came to nothing. But generally, things are staring you in the face. Back in the 90’s, I produced a play (see green profile to right) written by a wonderful Hungarian precursor to Havel, Odon von Horvath: Judgement Day. About? You guessed it, signal failure. I’m not going to tell you the story. Go. Read it and arm yourself for the revolution!

Remember I cited lack of communication as a feature of London transport a few blogs ago. Well, like Chomsky points out, often it’s damn well manipulative. Some station announcers have a game of giving you blatantly wrong information. Or they try to be faux comedic. God help us (or your equivalent)! I remember the one from Picadilly Circus station: “it’s raining on the North West of the lines, believe it or not”. You can warn me to get out my umbrella, but you can’t warn me about the suffocation I might endure on my next journey. There was a tube driver one who was genuinely funny. He called the Picadilly line the ‘Piccalydically’ line. He probably suffocated too, though, or was told to be more politically correct.

I must get clearance for the article a lawyer wrote for the Islington Gazette (local North London paper recently famous for Margaret Hodge, Labour MP and her anti-Blair remarks at a Fabian Society meeting), about the train he was on at the time of the London bombings. No announcements etc. when there could have been.

I’m running out of steam, now due to my chronic London transport disorder. Try googling ex-minister Stephen Byers and the Railtrack fiasco, too. Ooooh, people have such short memories don’t they.