season 5 about to start on FX

very good interview with aidan gillen (mayor ceretti) in metrolife today. Not sure if they have an online thing, I only found it as a memeber of staff who catches the train to work saw it and saved it for me, as I always go on about it.

also, macnulty interviewed in todays guardian. how did a boy from a rough council estate in sheffield go to eton?

I will give Season 5 a **** 3/4 rating. Almost perfect, but absolutely brilliant and unlike anything that the series offered before. I'm still dizzy and woozy from thinking about it. Be sure to wear something to protect your chin from it hitting the floor on multiple occasions.

To describe it in one word it would be "insane."

I can't wait for this to come out on DVD. I'm already spoiled up on the season, but need to see it for real.

here is the metrolife thing

The greatest show on TV starts its fifth and final season next week - and most people still haven't heard of it. Ignored by the main terrestrial channels and tucked away on FX, The Wire has never accumulated huge viewing figures in the way that other HBO series have managed.

But this coruscating look at how the Great American Experiment has gone wrong, refracted through the city of Baltimore and a cast of Russian novel proportions, has gathered critical acclaim from all quarters and a steady cult following (largely thanks to DVD box sets).

'It's one of the only shows I've seen that has something complex and meaningful to say about American society in general, and about the plight of urban black Americans in particular,' says Irish actor Aidan Gillen, who was chosen to play ambitious Baltimore politician Tommy Carcetti after he was spotted in The Caretaker on Broadway. 'I took the part without having seen a script but it was obvious we were talking about a class act.'

Creator David Simon, the former Baltimore journalist behind 1990s series Homicide: Life On The Street, roped in fellow ex-journalists, some of the US's top crime novelists (George Pelecanos, Dennis Lehane, Richard Price) and an ex-homicide-cop-turned-teacher to help him in his task of, as he describes it, building a US city block by block.

Each season of The Wire has focused on different aspects of life in Baltimore: the police and the drugs war; the plight of the working man; the machinations of City Hall; the failing school system. Storylines merge into intricate patterns, driving everyone towards their fates: Simon acknowledges how much Greek tragedy influenced the shape of the show.

The novelistic depth, brilliant dialogue and nuance lavished on even minor characters mean it takes few episodes to get you hooked.

Season five focuses on America's ailing newspaper industry, with Clark Johnson, as ink-in-the-blood Baltimore Sun city editor Gus Haynes, trying to hold on to basic journalistic standards in the face of overwhelming commercial pressures. Johnson jokingly describes Gus as 'the patron saint of journalism'.

'He's an unapologetic throwback but there's something charming about a Luddite who doesn't really think he is one,' he says. 'I think the dying newsroom idea is great; I wanted to spin off my character and make another show.'

His first glimpse of the real-life Baltimore Sun newsroom was 'pretty much what I'd expected - stacks of old newspapers, wretched, ancient computers and a whole bunch of white people running around,' he chuckles, adding that the last point was something the show wanted to comment on, given Baltimore is a majority-black city.

Johnson has history with Baltimore and Simon - he was Detective Meldrick Lewis on Homicide - and directed the pilot and the series finale of The Wire, something he also did for hard-hitting cop show The Shield.

'For The Shield, we'd created a frenetic, embedded camera approach, but I didn't want to go that route with The Wire,' he explains. 'I pitched the idea that we were surveilling, we stayed back and watched from a distance. That became the mantra in determining the look of the show.'

Johnson was beguiled by the characters of drug-gang mastermind and wannabe entrepreneur Stringer Bell (played by Brit actor Idris Elba in seasons one to three) and street addict Bubbles. 'I looked at Bubbles and thought: "There's no way you're gonna last the whole season, junkie man." It's testament to Andre Royo's portrayal that the character has lasted right to the bitter end.'

For Gillen, who joined in season three, it was the continuing story of the four young 'corner boys' Randy, Namond, Duquan and Michael that gripped him. 'It's an obvious one, I guess, because you're seeing children from that background, where you know their chances are limited and you feel so much for them because they're innocent.'

His own character, Carcetti, has one of the most interestingly developed arcs, as he goes from idealistic councilman to city mayor, who finds his good intentions bruised at every turn and soon sidelines them. While filming season five last year, Gillen also starred in two David Mamet plays (American Buffalo in Dublin and Glengarry Glen Ross in London) and sees parallels between the work of the great playwright and Simon's opus.

'The Wire is an honest look at American society but it's not hopeless. It's made by Americans who love the place that they come from and it's their right to criticise,' Gillen says. 'Not many people do it, though; it's unusual to find that on American TV.'

Quite what fans are supposed to do once it's all over is another matter - once you've fallen under the spell of The Wire, nothing else on TV seems to be much cop.

The Wire season five starts on FX on July 21.

macnulty in the guardian

'I just did my best De Niro impression'His portrayal of the wise-cracking Baltimore detective Jimmy McNulty in The Wire has made Dominic West a cult star. He talks to Sam Delaney about landing his career-making role, going to Eton with David Cameron, and working with Julia Roberts


Dominic West may be a star in west Baltimore but he is still unused to being noticed on the streets of the UK. "This gorgeous woman came dashing across the road shouting, 'I love you!' the other day," he says in his polished, public-school accent. "I said, 'That's great! Do we know each other?'" The woman turned out to be novelist Zadie Smith, an enormous fan of HBO's The Wire, in which West has played Detective James McNulty for the past five years. "The show provokes a kind of obsessive following," he says. "Those who love it kind of cherish the fact that it's not quite as world-renowned as The Sopranos. It's like being in a secret club."

Although it is not HBO's biggest commercial hit, few shows have received the same level of critical acclaim as The Wire. Ostensibly focused on a drug war in the port city of Baltimore, the show is both a sprawling depiction of urban decay that's Dickensian in its scope and a good-old fashioned tale of cops chasing criminals. This unique blend of novelistic depth and televisual excitement has attracted a diverse mix of fans. As well as Zadie Smith, West has recently been recognised by both the local drug dealer and the neighbourhood policeman near his north-west London home. This minor upsurge in fame is timely: The Wire's fifth and final series starts in the UK this month.

Since 2002, West, 39, has been the closest thing that The Wire's ensemble cast has had to a star. Jimmy McNulty is a drunken, obnoxious but strangely lovable detective with a dogged and destructive approach to his work. In a show famed for its meticulous authenticity, West seems every bit the hard-nosed Baltimore native, swaggering through the drug-swamped streets like he owns them, and machine-gunning sometimes impenetrable dialect as if it were his mother tongue. Which is all the more impressive considering he was born and raised in Sheffield and schooled at Eton.

Sitting opposite West in a scruffy office above a Soho pub, listening to him chat affably about his love of Chekhov and Tolstoy, it's difficult to comprehend that this is the guy you're used to seeing mooch into the DA's office in downtown Baltimore, drawling his catchphrase "What the fuck did I do?" Similarly, there is little that gives away his upbringing as the youngest of six children in an Irish Catholic family on the moors that fringe Sheffield. It was hardly a theatrical brood; his father worked in the plastics industry, making vandal-resistant bus shelters. "I remember him taking me to an estate and saying proudly: 'Look, this is the roughest estate in Sheffield and that bus stop is the only thing without any graffiti on it!" It was his mother who got him involved in a local drama group when he was nine.

The bus-stop game proved lucrative for his father, who decided to send his final child to the most elite of private schools. "And that was the start of my struggle!" says West, with a grim chuckle. "I was miserable for the first couple of years. Going there aged 13 was a bit of a wrench and I've been recovering from it ever since. It sounds like a cliche but acting was how I ended up finding my place there. I played Hamlet in the school production when I was 16 and that gave me an identity in the school." David Cameron was a couple of years ahead of him. "I didn't know him then but I do now. I know his wife a bit because my best friend used to be crazy for her. When she wound up marrying Cameron, we were like, 'Why do you want to be with that fucking Tory boy?'" West now lives just a stone's throw from the Camerons in west London but claims not to have infiltrated the Notting Hill set. "I must try harder to ingratiate myself with them," he laughs.

After Eton, he studied English literature at Trinity College Dublin, then went on to drama school. He found early success in the theatre, with the Peter Hall Company. Agents soon began to push him towards Hollywood: his square-jawed looks lend him a leading-man presence that is rare among highbrow British actors. Roles followed in "a series of terrible, terrible Hollywood rom-coms", starting with 28 Days, starring Sandra Bullock, which hardly inspired him to stick around. Later that same year, he joined the acrobatic Argentinian circus De La Guarda. "I'd turned 30, it was almost the millennium, and I got this urge to try some physical theatre before it was too late," he says. "I'd seen this show, which was a blend of acrobatics and dancing that had started in the clubs of Buenos Aires, and I just loved it. I approached them and they made me do five auditions. I wasn't very good at the acrobatic stuff but they could see I was very enthusiastic and took me on that basis."

West was trained to run up walls and perform extravagant aerial dance routines while suspended on wires from the roof of the Camden Roundhouse. He lasted five months. "We would swoop down and pick people up from the audience. It was great fun," he enthuses. "But it became that year's favourite place for a Christmas office-party outing. People were turning up pissed. Some of them would try to assault the performers. That wasn't how it was supposed to work - we were supposed to be assaulting them!"

Soon, he was lured back to Hollywood, first for a supporting role in Chicago opposite Renée Zellweger. "I learned a lot from working with her," he said. "She was so tough. I would hear the director say, 'Cut' and then wait for instructions; she would demand another 15 takes until she was absolutely happy with the scene. These leading ladies have it tough: they have to be girly enough to remain attractive but retain a steeliness to get their own way too. Plus, they seem to starve themselves all day to stay in shape."

Next came a role opposite Julia Roberts in Mona Lisa Smile. "The movie didn't make much sense. We would be given new scenes to film out of the blue which, it transpired, had been written by Julia's agent, who was doubling as a producer," he says. "I don't know what anyone was doing there. No one seemed to enjoy it. Especially not Julia. She had just got married and just wanted to be off having sex with her husband. Trouble was, she had married the cameraman on the movie. You can't really relax in a sex scene when the husband is staring right at you."

Typecast as "the drunken-arsehole English boyfriend", West was ready to turn his back on the US when he he was asked to send in an audition tape for The Wire. "I set up a video camera in my living room and started doing my best Robert De Niro impression," he says. "My girlfriend was supposed to be reading the other lines but she was laughing too much so I just had to leave pauses where necessary. Anyway, within 10 days I was in Baltimore shadowing a homicide cop."

He was initially reluctant to sign HBO's five-year contract but was reassured by his agent, who told him: "Don't worry, it'll only last one season." On his arrival in Baltimore, a taxi driver apologised to him for the state of the city. "I said, 'Are you kidding? I'm from Sheffield! This looks beautiful!'" he recalls. But working alongside real detectives proved challenging. "Within a day I was standing in the trauma unit of a hospital with the family of a guy who had just been shot three times in the head but was still alive. I was thinking: I just hope nobody speaks to me because I hadn't learned to do the accent yet."

His agent, it turned out, was wrong. The Wire was repeatedly recommissioned. As a result, West has spent a large chunk of the past five years living in Baltimore in an apartment block he shares with the show's other principal actors. Also among the cast were east Londoner Idris Elba and Irishman Aidan Gillen. Why would a show so preoccupied with realism cast so many actors from this side of the Atlantic? "I know we're cheaper than Americans. Maybe we're more malleable too," says West. "I think we're more used to the idea of being part of an ensemble. Maybe we're just better actors."

He filmed his final episodes last year. Recent film work has included 300 and Hannibal Rising but he seems ambivalent about US movie roles. "I've never really seen myself as a Hollywood leading man," he says. "My plan remains what it has always been: to do whatever comes up that seems interesting. Trouble is, there's very little interesting stuff that comes up." He directed one of The Wire's final episodes and developed a taste for being behind the camera. But will he ever get to work with material as unique as The Wire again? "Its one of those shows that comes along every 10 or 20 years that redefines a genre," he says. "I think there might be more shows of that standard in future because it has taken writing on in some way - you can't be less than The Wire now and still ring true".

· Season five of the Wire begins on FX on Monday

Yeah Matej, even knowing the spoilers - the way they're presented and how they're filmed, they still blow you away.

It's like seeing a good production of Hamlet or Romeo&Juliet. If they do it right, the moments still pop.

Time to clear the Sky box cos I'm off to Beijing for the olympics, grrrr.

I wrote a gently chiding letter to the Guardian about their blink-and-you'd-miss-it mention of the amazing Idris Elba in that article. West is great, but Elba's performance as Stringer Bell is spellbinding.

From Hackney, you know.

wasnt he in an episode of absolutely fabulous?

Ooh, youse who haven't seen series five, what a treat you have in store . . .

I occasionally check Amazon's top sellers to make sure I'm not missing anything on my DVD rental list and, incredibly and beautifully, The Wire boxsets are numbers 1, 2, 7, and 8. What's going on? Do that many people watch Newsnight Review?

It's the first mixtape show out there.

The same how hip-hoppers have simply resorted to bootlegging their own songs, and selling them on the street, The Wire's resorted to word-of-mouth and the street.

Wyatt Earp - The Guardian (or it might have been The Observer) ran a massive interview piece with (the amazing) Idris Elba/Stringer Bell about a year ago.

Don't want to read this thread of spoilers, but I'd just like to say a big thanks to JV whose recommendations of how good this show was eons ago were a big part of encouraging me to eventually getting round to see the show.

Great work JV. Are those old Wire threads still accessible at all?