Christopher Walken painted over a Banksy mural on the set of a BBC crime series

• The actor Christopher Walken painted over Banksy's artwork as part of the BBC show "The Outlaws."
• The BBC said Banksy did the artwork for the show, and Walken painted over them as part of the plot.

The actor Christopher Walken painted over a Banksy artwork for a new BBC TV show.

Banksy agreed to paint one of his signature rats on the set of "The Outlaws" in Bristol, and Walken then painted over it as part of the show, the BBC said.

A spokesperson for the show said: "We can confirm that the artwork at the end of The Outlaws was an original Banksy, and that Christopher Walken painted over that artwork during the filming of this scene, ultimately destroying it."

Characters in the show take part in community service, cleaning a building.

Walken's character is cleaning a wall when he spots the artwork, and his supervisor in the show doesn't look at what it is before agreeing that he should paint over it, the BBC said.

This isn't the first time a Banksy artwork has been painted over or damaged in public. Earlier this year, police in Suffolk, England, launched an investigation to find the person who defaced a Banksy artwork with white paint, one week after it first appeared on a sea wall in the Suffolk town of Lowestoft.

The artwork depicted a rodent sipping from a cocktail in a deckchair.

Although Banksy's identity remains unknown, the street artist's work continues to pull in big figures at auctions houses across the world. Earlier this year, the artist's "Love is in the Bin" painting, which was famously sliced by a shredder concealed in its frame at an auction in 2018, sold for £16 million at Sotheby's in London.

Following the historic sale, Alex Branczik, chairman of modern and contemporary art at Sotheby's Asia, said: "Banksy is no stranger to making headlines and this latest chapter in his story has captured imaginations across the world - we can only begin to guess what might come next."