Bayliss: You never say please. You never say thank you. Pembleton: Please don't be an idiot. Thank you.

Det. Stan Bolander: It’s hard to meet single woman on this job. You meet plenty of widows, but the timing just don’t seem right.

Before The Wire, there was Homicide: Life On The Street.

Now The Wire is widely regarded as the best TV show ever made, so its going to take quite some nostalgia trip to find something better, but the lead contender has to be Homicide: Life on the Street.

Also set in Baltimore, and created by The Wire creator and writer David Simon, Homicide was gritty, grim and hardly watched when it originally aired back in the 1990s. It also featured many of the same supporting cast.

It was quite different from The Wire, though – it was all about the police, though there were recurring villains like Luther Mahoney, as well as some rather dodgy cops.

My favourite thing about Homicide was the pairing of Tim Bayliss and Frank Pembleton, with Bayliss constantly seeking Pembleton’s approval and affection. (Spoiler alert for all these links that follow.)

But you didn’t need to love Frank and Tim to love Homicide. Homicide had it all – heavy smoking, comedy about penile stussification, a bar run by cops and the best police station shoot-out ever.

It also featured Richard Belzer, who in one of the most extensive crossovers ever has ended up reprising Homicide’s Detective Munch character seven times, in comedies and sci-fi as well as police dramas – including Law & Order, The X Files, Arrested Development and, of course, The Wire.

Which leads me neatly back where we started.

Homicide: Life on the Street isn’t quite as good as The Wire, but it was Homicide that first made me fall in love with long-running story arcs, and the city of Baltimore, and gritty crime shows.

Consigned these days to occasional repeats on cable or ITV4, Homicide is still available on DVD and illegal internet download. Worth tracking down.