The Wire’s West criticises the BBC

Dominic West, one of the British actors in the US television series The Wire, has offended BBC bosses by hitting out at the state of British television and accusing it of lacking "high end drama".

The 40-year-old Old Etonian who plays the hard-boiled detective Jimmy McNulty in The Wire ­ - which aired for the first time on mainstream British television on Monday night with its debut on BBC2 - ­ suggested that the Corporation is forced to produce high-brow costume dramas such as Cranford at the expense of contemporary drama.

"We do costume drama brilliantly, and I love costume drama. No-one does it like the BBC... But if you talk to any BBC producers, they abhor the fact... they are dying to do The Wire and hate doing Cranford."

West's comments, made in an interview on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, were dismissed by the Corporation as "nonsense". Ben Stephenson, controller of BBC drama, told the Daily Telegraph: "Cranford was a multi-award-winning drama that was enjoyed by more than 7.5 million viewers every week and starred some of the greatest acting talent in the UK. To suggest that producers 'hate' working on such pieces is nonsense and certainly not a view shared by those involved in this particular series."

Fans of The Wire, which features several British and Irish actors including Idris Elba of The Bill and Aiden Gillen from Queer As Folk, will be hoping that the BBC doesn't take its revenge on West by sidelining The Wire any more than it already has - 11.20 pm hardly being a peak-time slot for what is being labeled the finest TV series ever made.

BBC2 has a reputation here: it infamously upset fans some years ago when, after buying the rights to Seinfeld, then reckoned to be the funniest comedy series ever made, it buried the show in a graveyard slot and often dropped it without notice.