Baldrick's London knicker-twist

Arise, Sir Tony Robinson, to accept the Microgroove Award (2014) for the most easily missed non-sequitur on British radio in this year of our Lord, 2014.

The famous actor was being interviewed by diamond geezer Robert Elms for his weekly "Listed Londoner" feature on the BBC Radio London mid-day show.

Having talked at length about his favourite bits of London, his favourite buildings and open spaces, the Baldrick actor then asserted, without any particular irony, that he was a north London bloke through and through, and that in his opinion,  south London was something of "a contradiction in terms".

A question or two later, he is asked to name his favourite London film, book or play. He chooses John Lanchester's 2012 novel, Capital. The novel, he said, gave him an insight into the new London, the city of hedge funds and the meeting of extreme wealth and dire poverty, and of clashing ideologies.

So, Capital is clearly a powerful novel, the quintessential early-21st century London novel? But it is almost entirely - and very specifically - set in south London. South west London. Well,  Clapham, if you must know.

Entertaining advice for Northern Line commuters from Transport for London

"Northern Line commuters urged to walk or cycle". The BBC headline elicits a dry chuckle around these parts.

That thing where you get to the station at 8.15, needing to be in Wapping by 9.30 - and the trains pull up, and one or two squeeze in, some, you can see them, their jobs or lives simply depend on it, they throw themselves into the dense forest of angry humans.

 Others - self included - simply cannot face that. You stand there, watching the trains pull in and pull out. I have have counted fifteen, twenty, twenty five. I have stood there for  forty minutes. I have so often given up and gone home and phoned in sick. I have walked, and now I always cycle.

However urgent the need to get somewhere, you actually can not dive in, push others out of  your way, and then suffer their glaring, your head and neck bent under the mean Northern Line carriage ceilings, your legs delicately placed within a centimetre of six other pairs of legs.

You think to yourself, only one of the three hundred or so fragile souls in this carriage has to crack and we all go down.

Yes, tfl, it obviously better to walk or cycle to Stockwell, I have had to do that dozens of times. In fact I gave up using your shit service to get to work in 2006.

Meanwhile, if you really want  people to find other ways of getting to work from Tooting, Balham, Clapham South, Clapham Common, Clapham Norht - then give them a financial incentive to do so. Or shut the fuck up and improve your service.