Creator of The Wire to be Television Festival's star guest

Published on Tuesday 5 May 2009 22:35

THE creator of award-winning TV series The Wire is set to be a star guest at this year's Edinburgh International Television Festival.

David Simon will be joined by British actor Dominic West, who played the hard-drinking police detective Jimmy McNulty in the Baltimore-set TV series, at the August festival, it was announced yesterday.

Sheffield-born West also stars in Channel 4's The Devil's Whore.

Simon worked as a crime reporter for 13 years at the Baltimore Sun newspaper. He will give a masterclass on how he used the experience as a springboard into a massively successful new career creating and producing television programmes.

The Wire, a hard-hitting series pitting police against drug gangsters in the US city, ran in the US from 2002 to 2008 but the series has more recently built a huge following in Britain.

First shown here on the FX satellite TV channel, it has proved a big ratings hit on BBC2, with its gritty take on American street life.

Simon was also writer and executive producer on Generation Kill, an American mini-series depicting US Marines in the early days of the Iraq conflict. The author of two novels based on the experience of his crime beat, he also writes for the New Yorker magazine.

The three-day festival opens on 28 August and is expected to attract 2,000 industry figures to the city.

The speaker at this year's keynote MacTaggart lecture was recently announced as media mogul James Murdoch. The BSkyB chairman will appear 20 years after his father Rupert Murdoch gave a famous MacTaggart lecture. He is seen as heir apparent to the Murdoch media empire.