I had been feeling the odd twinge of paranoia. After all, this was a TV show described by the Sunday Times' resident intellectual Bryan Appleyard as part of "America's national theatre". There had been three pieces a day about it in most papers throughout the week in the run-up to the broadcast of the new series on Monday. Ross Anderson, in the Times, summed up the euphoria: "In its praise, critics have summoned Shakespeare, Dickens, Tolstoy and the Greek tragedians."
Clearly, The Wire was not to be missed - and yet, five series in, I'd never even heard of it. I was about to go into hiding, when I stumbled over the viewing figures for the first episode of the fifth and final series - 38,000. Let's repeat that - 38,000!!!! About the same as the number who turn up for a mid-table Premiership soccer team, and way below the total attendance at the Headingley Test.
At a stroke, my sense of cultural inferiority was banished. I had been following the Test match pretty solidly over its four benighted days; I hadn't got a clue what The Wire was about, or how on earth to find the channel - something called FX - on which it was being shown. And for once I was siding with the majority.
I haven't really watched much TV, news and sport aside, since Morecambe and Wise were in their pomp. I watched so much as a child that I was more or less played out by 18. I had no access to a telly at university, lost the habit and have never regained it.
I have never seen Seinfeld, Frasier, Cheers, Peep Show, Nighty Night, The Fast Show, The Simpsons, Sex and the City, South Park, Big Brother, The Apprentice, Dragons' Den, and on and on. I have often tried to hide this fact, but now, thanks to the vast disparity between the column inches devoted to The Wire and bums on sofas, I can at last proclaim it. Television is dead. Long live The Oresteia, Measure for Measure, Bleak House, War and Peace.
