Last Night's Television - The Wire, BBC2; Dispatches: The Trouble With Boris, Channel 4

Fifteen years ago, the eminent journalist Hunter Davies was fired as television critic of the Mail on Sunday when in a review of EastEnders he admitted that he had never watched the soap before. Sir David English, the grand panjandrum of Associated Newspapers, decided this was beyond the pale for a TV critic, and ordered his dismissal. I know that Hunter won't mind me telling this story, partly because the person promoted from a lowly TV listings job to take his place was your humble columnist, an exciting and yet embarrassing turn of events, since it had been Hunter who recommended me to the Mail on Sunday a year earlier, having read my stuff in the pages of his local paper in north London. It's all in his autobiography, which, I should add, belatedly sucking up, is splendid.

Anyway, I write this review in a stew of apprehension lest history now repeat itself, for last night I watched The Wire for the first time, which I realise is a shameful admission from a man paid to watch the telly, because The Wire, since it was first transmitted in 2002 by the American cable channel HBO, has been praised to the heavens as one of the finest drama serials ever made. A friend of mine, who adored The Sopranos, assured me that The Wire was better, and while, in my defence, it was first shown here only on an obscure satellite channel, the boxsets have been knocking around for some time. Well, BBC2 has now saved me the expense, so hats off to them. But hats back on regarding the transmission time: 11.20pm. Schedulers should have shown a little more daring, especially after the scorn heaped upon them a few years ago for shunting two other marvellous US imports, Seinfeld and The Larry Sanders Show, close to the witching hour.

This is a shame, because The Wire requires the kind of concentration that in most households has started to evaporate by the time the credits roll on Newsnight. I had heard that some of its dialogue was almost impenetrable, so I was prepared, but even so there were large chunks that sailed over my motherfucking head. Frequently repeated in The Wire as a noun, adjective, verb and even preposition, the MF word does not count among my favourites, but I grew quite fond of it on the basis that I could at least identify it. Still, my friend the Wire addict tells me that my ear will become attuned and I certainly plan to give my ear every chance.

Besides, it was clear within moments of the first episode starting that this is a classy production. It is set in Baltimore, its hero a rugged detective called Jimmy McNulty (Dominic West), whose challenge in this opening series is to overcome resistance from his superiors, who appear either complacent or corrupt, to bring to book the kingpin of a local drug-dealing gang. Nothing very original there, of course. Change the location, and the lapels, and it could be the plot of an old Starsky and Hutch. But in the naturalism of the acting and language there is real TV majesty. In our house we might not yet know what's going on, but we're already hooked, especially as we've given up on Damages, the drama about a New York law firm starring Glenn Close that was so spellbindingly brilliant in the first series, but seems to be disappearing up its own fundament in the second.

Whatever, it is a dispiriting truth that again and again the most compelling drama, and comedy, too, for that matter, is crossing the Atlantic from west to east. There used at least to be an equal flow in both directions. So I intend to claw back some partisan pride from the fact that Detective McNulty is played by Dominic West, who looks and sounds as though he was hewn from Baltimore dockside girders but is actually an Old Etonian from Yorkshire.

Speaking of Old Etonians, Boris Johnson was the subject of last night's fascinating Dispatches, in which the shaggy one's record as Mayor of London as the first anniversary of his election approaches was scrutinised, and lambasted, by the journalist Antony Barnett and an outspoken supporting cast.

Clearly, Barnett had an agenda and adhered to it faithfully, finding example upon example of Boris saying one thing and doing another, or using honeyed rhetoric to conceal general cackhandedness. I imagine that there is also documentary evidence to suggest that Boris is a good thing, but he was caught bang to rights on a tape, played by Dispatches, in which his friend and fellow OE, the fraudster Darius Guppy, relayed his intention to have a meddling News of the World journalist beaten up. "How badly," asked Boris, "are you going to hurt this guy?" Not, note, "Don't be such an idiot, what you're suggesting is illegal and immoral." Admittedly, it all happened a long time ago. And nobody used the MF word. But it was still as shocking as anything I heard on The Wire.