…and the brakes are apparently stuck. We were already 11 minutes late leaving Haymarket (precise time courtesy of FirstScotrail’s text alerts, which helpfully tell you when trains are delayed, albeit by a text that usually arrives once you’re already on board).

Ah, we’re now on the move. 20 minutes late for a journey that only takes 30. At least I can moan online.

Update: We’re stuck again.

“This train is a failure,” the conductor told us at Polmont and we all disembarked. I got the impression that he and the driver had been told that problems with the brakes meant that it wasn’t safe to carry passengers. The train then sat in the station for a while before finally pulling out to allow the services behind to pass through. Fortunately, the delay had now passed half an hour so the next half hourly service was just behind. Finally got home fifty minutes late.

Given that I have two train journeys a day, I guess I should be grateful that this sort of thing is very rare.

So say the Conservatives, apparently, who have delayed their London mayoral selection by six months. Their excuse, courtesy of Francis Maude, is that

We have also received expressions of interest from a number of very serious potential candidates for whom the timescale we originally set is too restrictive.

Everyone else well assume, not unreasonably, that the Tories aren’t happy with those who’ve put their names forward, none of whom will be familiar to most voters. If the party high command isn’t enthused about them, it’s hard to see how the electorate will be.

We’re told the most well known is Nicholas Boles, a Cameronista who failed to win Hove at the General Election. Londoners will be understandably suspicious of the commitment to the capital of any candidate who contested a parliamentary seat in a different city just last year.

As for those put off by the timescale – clearly these potential candidates would each make for a very decisive mayor…

Watching Charlie Brooker’s Screen Wipe on BBC Four last night, I was reassured that my DVD collection isn’t as unfashionable as I thought: Brooker praised Columbo, possibly the least hip box sets I own. He also rightly recommended Monk, a marvellously amusing (if not too intellectually taxing on the Whodunnit scale) US series about an obsessive-compulsive detective.

But the highlight of this week’s Screen Wipe for me was his description of Elizabeth Estensen off of Emmerdale Farm (call it by its name) as

“Elizabeth Estensen from The Liver Birds and T-Bag.”

There is no logic to it; it just pleased me.

Armando Iannucci’s Time Trumpet was, as Alex says, a bit hit and miss, but the Doctor is worth the monsters hits were worth the misses and the combined average was well above par.* My favourite bit (as picked out too by Paul Evans in Alex’s comments box) was Stewart Lee’s line

What is more disgusting, a girl singing with her guts hanging out and her intestines slung over her shoulder… or the institution of the monarchy?

Roll on next Thursday.

*”Above par” is in golf, of course, a bad thing, but here I’m using it to mean a good thing.

Of course you are – it’s been almost a week since he popped up on The Ultimate West Wing Challenge.

Fear not – your Oaten appetite can be sated via a podcast. Not his own, thankfully (although I confess some surprise that he and his wife aren’t running a Darbyshire style blogspot confessional) but a British Library panel discussion entitled – surprise, surprise – “Prurience or privilege: are politicians entitled to a private life?”

Now don’t all download it at once…