The Wire finally gets a slot at the Beeb

Monday, March 30: The BBC has at last caught up with popular taste and tonight begins screening all 60 episodes of The Wire, the US cop show that those in the know have been claiming for ages is the best thing ever made for television - The Sopranos included, which is saying something.

Using a brilliant ensemble cast, including some British and Irish actors as well as Americans, the show is set amid the black underclass of Baltimore, a city whose population is 60 per cent African-American and where the homicide rate is six times that of New York.

As The First Post reported a year ago, when the fifth and final series was about to be shown in the States, The Wire deals with "the ceaseless dance between crime and the law, a relentless merry-go-round of dashed virtue and dark triumph. In a genre that has gone stale since Hill Street Blues broke the mold in the 1980s, The Wire dazzles with complexity, honesty and deeply human characters - police, drug dealers, street soldiers, lawyers, politicians... You care about them all."

Created by David Simon, a former crime reporter on the Baltimore Sun, the HBO show first appeared in 2002, since when it has developed a cult following on both sides of the Atlantic. Until its late-night BBC2 debut today (it screens at 11.20pm, and continues on consecutive nights for the time being at least) UK followers had to watch it on FX or get hold of boxed sets of DVDs.

The series is known for its use of street slang. To help first-timers, the Independent on Sunday yesterday published a helpful glossary. Here's a
taste:
Burner - disposable cellphone used by drug dealers to prevent police monitoring their conversations
Cheese - money
Corner boy - low-level drugs trade operative who sells on the street corner
Fiend - someone addicted to drugs
G pack - Wholesaler's package of 100 vials of cocaine
Hopper (Little) - Youngster below the level of corner boy (see above), usually serving as a look-out
Mope - Police term for a drug dealer
Shameful shit - Unethical behaviour
Slinging - selling drugs
Yo - Police term for a corner boy (see above)

FIRST POSTED MARCH 30, 2009