Ah-ha. Got you. Anyone that's had the misfortune of having me hold forth on this HBO programme will know I'm quite a fan. You might even have described me as evangelical. I'm not kidding though, it isn't good television.

For years, The Wire was the best television show you hadn't seen. When it did hit the airwaves in the UK it was on little-watched satellite channel F/X. This meant that the few people who did see it here had downloaded it bought the DVD box sets. Of course, like any small group of fans, there was a certain cachet to being in the know.

Still, there was certainly a lot of word-of-mouth publicity, and the DVDs started to sell well. By the time the fifth and final season was airing in the US, publicity had gone into overdrive, with visits from David Simon (the show's co-creator) and rave writeups in broadsheet newspapers. The Wire had definitely arrived. Of course the more people that saw it, the more people there were that didn't like it. Stands to reason, and their opinion was absolutely valid. It didn't coincide with mine though.

Then the BBC decided to buy it. And that's when I started to have problems with it. The first season is notoriously slow-starting, in fact it took two or three false starts before I got hooked. That's a bad foot to get off on, since we have literally hundreds of channels to choose from these days. 3-4 hours is a lot of TV watching time to invest in a programme before it gets interesting for you. Word-of-mouth is the best form of advertising though, so perhaps we can forgive it this flaw.

The "fatal" flaw lies in scheduling the show. The BBC, with very little choice given that they had 50 one hour episodes to screen, opted to show them on consecutive weekday evenings. Not a problem you might think. Well, it is, when it takes ten weeks to show the lot, since an hour is a terribly long time to schedule every day. So it has to be on at an unsociable time. Like finishing after midnight. Add in a social life, or a bad memory, or (shock horror!) no Sky Plus, and you're guaranteed to miss some episodes.

It's not a forgiving series for that sin. There are lots of threads, and characters that are introduced several seasons before they become significant. You really need to see everything, and remember what's going on. That's one of the reasons, along with its slow pacing, that a weekly slot isn't ideal for it.

Oh, did I mention that the BBC didn't obtain rights to put it on iPlayer? Well, they didn't. Our friends in the scheduling department tried their hardest, putting on a weekly, very late, super long omnibus. Frankly, if you forgot to record the episode you missed, you'd have to be very patient to avoid the following ones and wait for the weekend to record them all the ones you'd missed. Oh, then you'd frantically have to watch them on Sunday before the whole shebang started up again on Monday.

Let's be honest, The Wire could contain the secret of eternal life, and 99% of us aren't going to go through that rigmarole to watch what is, in the end, JUST A TELEVISION PROGRAMME.

So there you have it. I genuinely think HBO's finest is just about untransmittable and unwatchable via the aerial on your roof. That's why it never got great ratings in the USA, despite critical acclaim. If HBO wasn't a subscription model cable channel, I doubt it even gets a second season. The only way to watch it is on DVD (or obtained illegally via your computer). You need to have all the episodes available, for you to watch at your own pace. I know this applies to quite a few shows, like 24 for example, but that still sort of works on a weekly basis, with its hourly twist to make you tune in next week.

So how many programmes will get made, straight to DVD, with 50 one hour episodes? Exactly. It needs to be on TV first. And you can't show it effectively on that platform. So it's not good television.

I do love it though.