Have you ever been Lost in American box set heaven?

This first appeared in the Bath Chronicle of May 27. It was after the final show of the cult TV programme Lost...

Where were you at around 5am on Monday?

The chances are the vast majority of you were happily in the land of nod, but for a significant minority of people, they were up, staring at a screen and taking part in a simultaneous televisual event with our American cousins.

The event in question was the finale of the much-hyped and frequently baffling American series Lost.

This began just a few years ago as an intriguing tale of a group of people whose plane crashed into an obscure island which appeared cut off from the rest of the world. As the viewer soon discovered, nothing was quite as it seemed and the title of the programme soon began to mirror many people's position in connection with the plot.

Despite that, the programme had a loyal following and after going in ever bizarre different directions it reached its grand finale,broadcast amid much pomp and circumstance, n Monday.
I won't give away the ending in case you haven't yet seen it but suffice to say, one person I heard said they wept at the beauty of it all while another of my friends, who had religiously watched every episode, was weeping tears of rage and threatened to jump on a plane, head for Hawaii and ask the writer for all those hours of his life back.

Personally I 'lost' Lost in the middle of the second series so I will be avoiding any tears but this is all a classic example to me of the modern-day phenomenon of epic, long- running modern TV dramas which really can take over your life.

I have been bitten a couple of times by this 'box set bug' where, even if you miss something on the TV when it first came out, you then buy it all again on DVD and watch it at your own pace.

One time was with the American political drama The West Wing, which I thought was an exceptional piece of work as it followed the life of an almost perfect American president and his entourage. And in a Bath Chronicle exclusive I can tell you that I saw early evidence that the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats could be of the same mind because I recall having equally enthusiastic debates about this programme with our two local MPs Don Foster and Jacob Rees-Mogg who were both equally smitten with President Bartlett's battles in the White House.

Elsewhere, I know people with similar love affairs (complete with bulging box sets) with dramas such as 24, Six Feet Under, The Sopranos, House et al.

One of the things that you can't help but notice, however, is that all of these mega dramas are American and I do wonder at what point the epic, intelligent TV show became the almost exclusive providence of our American friends. I am sure once we had a superiority about the quality of our TV?

Maybe I am wrong on this but, be honest, can you imagine many Americans getting up at 5am to watch the grand finale of Doc Marten or Heartbeat?

Nope, nor me.

Get wired up the wonderful Wire

Tonight (Monday, March 30) the BBC will do something quite unprecedented in its long and proud history.

For, if my understanding of the situation is correct, they will be screening a 60-show American drama series from start to finish every single night. It will run on BBC2, after Newsnight, from Monday to Friday and whole swathes of their schedule has been arranged to fit around it.

The show, therefore, must be something pretty special. And trust me, it truly is.

Just by way of a starter, it is Barack Obama’s favourite show on TV, but beyond that, magazines and newspapers from Time and The Chicago Tribune in America to The Guardian and The Independent over here have hailed it as possibly the greatest television show ever made. One reviewer said quite simply that the world is divided into two sets of people – those who have seen this programme and love it and those who simply haven’t yet seen it.

The programme is called The Wire. Never heard of it? Then don’t worry, because large sections of the public haven’t either as it was only previously shown on television in this country on a very obscure satellite channel called FX.

What has catapulted The Wire into our consciousness is a modern-day phenomenon of watching television – via the box set. There was a time when the only way you could watch the next episode in a drama was to wait until the scheduler allowed you to do so, but as people have grown to love top-class, lengthy American dramas such as 24, Lost and the magnificent West Wing, people have been snapping up the box sets at an incredible rate. Then they watch the shows as and when THEY want to.

And this is why I think the Beeb’s scheduling of The Wire to run on consecutive nights to keep up the pace set by box sets is so inspired.

For the record, I would add my own voice to those who would argue that The Wire is quite possibly the greatest TV series ever made and I think you could only really enjoy its multi-layered, multi-faceted, in-depth story lines if you watch them close together as it is a series full of nuances, subtleties and seemingly random moments that only make sense in other, later episodes.

For those who don’t actually know, The Wire is focused on the drugs culture in Baltimore and it looks at it from every conceivable angle. It is a rough, tough and gritty and nothing is black and white, nothing is clean cut and there are no compromises whatsoever to language or to traditional beginning-middle-end storytelling.

OK, tonight's kick off time of 11.20pm is rather late but it's worth it. Get ready to get wired.