Going down the Tubes

With the Queen Mother now interred, and interest in the royal family waning by the day, isn't it time this country became a sensible grown-up republic?

Thank you for offering, and yes, I shall be running (well, jogging) for the office of President, and once elected, I shall rule Old Testament-style, with a rod of iron. On my first day in charge, all traffic wardens and wheel clampers will be shot through the head and cremated, and their ashes used to fill in the dreadful potholes in our roads; and to discourage bicycle theft, all saddles will be fitted with spring-loaded bayonets that will thrust upwards through the seat if an unauthorised person tries to pedal the machine away.

Furthermore, while other countries celebrate Mothering Sunday, I shall inaugurate Smothering Sunday, when (live on TV) the likes of Michael Winner, Jeffrey Archer and Andrew Lloyd Webber will be humanely dispatched by a strong man with a pillow. Firm but fair, that'll be my slogan. You know it makes sense.

I shall also introduce capital punishment for people who waste their own time (and everyone else's) by thinking up ridiculous challenges, in the hope of entering the Guinness Book of Records. Which is bad news for Geoff Marshall, who currently spends most of his waking hours planning to beat the world record for travelling on the London Underground (itself a form of capital punishment), a feat that involves visiting all 275 stations in less than 19 hours, 18 minutes and 45 seconds.

"I just want to do it," he told us on last night's Metroland: Race Around the Underground (ITV1), "so I can say, yeah, I've done that. Even though it's pointless, I've still done it."

After listening to him for a few minutes, it wasn't hard to understand his motivation. Some men climb mountains because they are there, whereas people like Geoff prefer to hurtle around the Tube because they're not all there.

Wherever there are trains, there are nerds, but this programme introduced us to a new and more virulent strain: the Super Nerd. Geoff was filmed planning his latest attempt in minute and wearisome detail, with the help of several chums who also didn't have girlfriends, the whole bunch resembling the love children of Thomas the Tank Engine and Gordon Brittas (the sort of people who wear shirts straight from the packet, with the fold lines still on them).

Peter was introduced by Geoff as "the brainy one," although surely a genuinely intelligent person wouldn't waste his life calculating the quickest way from Heathrow to Amersham via everywhere else, and I suspect that if he had dynamite for brains, he wouldn't even be able to blow his nose.

Geoff, meanwhile, described himself as "potty" (something that only the mind-numbingly sane-but-dull ever do), but for sheer tedium he couldn't hold a candle to Jack Welsby, the current record holder and a man whose sole purpose in life is clearly to act as a warning to others.

Once the attempt got underway, the programme transmogrified into a televisual version of Mornington Crescent, with Geoff rushing nimbly from Knightsbridge to Sloane Square, while congratulating himself on the shrewdness of his sideways manoeuvre. But despite his claims of exceptional speed, what we saw mostly involved him sitting still and eating sandwiches, and the inaction wasn't improved by the dismally obvious choice of music, with The Jam's Going Underground giving way to The New Vaudeville Band as we approached Finchley Central.