Remote controls: some bits of the tube work just like a scalectrix. "Mustard again - AND my arm hurts," so moans one of the many human 'circuit breakers'.   Undercover report: Pale young photo-sensitvie photo-journalist Robin Trotter done been doin' some snoopin' under some covers and around some corners and down a bit in London’s Underground, and he found that the decay goes deep. Way deep. All the way to its bottom.

LU Confidential.

London Underground. It always raises a question on the mouth in the middle of your face: why doesn’t it work very well? And when is it going to get better?

But the full scale of the tubes' decays has always remained the private knowledge of London's secret underground: namely the people who work underground on the Underground, the London Underground staff.

This depth of secrecy is why I went down in disguise (in a beard and a hat and Dustin Hoffman's lips) to uncover the truth that’s hidden behind the tissue of lies that’s concealed in a pocket of knowledge behind the hanky of duplicity.

And here’s the shocking truth of it, right down under here:

Wherever you are in the tube network, you’re only ten feet away from a cat.
Cats is awful as everybody knows - but nowhere worse than down the tube. A direct tunnel from the New London Theatre lets them come and go as they please with their bad songs, thanks to a giant Cats flap near Holborn.

There is a two-foot gap in the track between Bank and Liverpool Street.
“You gotta get some speed up,” one driver told us. “I just close my eyes and goes for it.”

To supplement their income, underground staff catch blind tube mice.
They sell them to Victorian beauticians, where their furs are fashioned into false eyebrows for posh ladies.

There is one man whose job it is to keep his finger on a loose electric cable all day long, with no breaks.
“I have to lie in this tiny little service tunnel on the East London Line,” he told us. “At four o’clock they bring me sandwiches, with beef and mustard. I hate mustard.”

There is one train on the circle line that has been going around and around with its doors jammed shut for over a month now.
Passengers have been kept alive with a supply of Dime Bars and Sesame Snaps inserted through the air vents. Last week a kindly member of the public tried to insert an olive through the grills and brought the system crashing to its knees for 4 hours.

Tube drivers told me all about some supernatural happenings that chilled my bones.
Some say they are haunted by so-called “ghost stations” – disused tube interchanges that follow them home at night and haunt them.

P-p-pick up a crossbow.
Vigilante group “the guardian angels” – presumed to have disbanded – in actual fact now inhabit the rafters of stations, from where they pick off pickpockets with pocket crossbows.

That's all my news, and as ever it's all very hush hush, etc.