DEBORAH’S MUST-WATCH TV CLASSICS

GAME OF THRONES (2011-2019)

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Before I watched Game Of Thrones (starring Emilia Clarke, right), I was one of those people who saw swords and dwarfs and snowy mountains and leather jerkins and wine chalices and rolled their eyes. But I bought the first-season box set and watched one episode, then another, and another, until it was six on the trot, which is something I hadn’t done since The Wire, when I watched eight on the trot and came out into the light blinking and calling everyone ‘blood’.

I was not so keen at the very beginning, with The Wall and White Walkers, possibly because I like my natural natural, rather than super-, but by the end of the first episode, when Bran Stark was pushed from a high window by Jaime Lannister, who had been having sex with the queen, who also happened to be his sister, I was thinking: ‘Whoa, this is crazy. Whoa, this is cool.’ Unlike so much TV drama, GOT does not take you for a dummy. It treats you as, you know, quite smart, actually. It assumes you can hold information in your head, keep track of kingdoms and can not just deal with a vast ensemble of characters but can deal with them even when they do not instantly introduce themselves with a blurt of exposition. I don’t have the space to go into the complicated plotting and complicated characters here (except to say: Joffrey, world’s creepiest boy king) but do wish you to know that I appreciated it for what it is: a richly imagined world, powerfully realised, and tarted up with a ton of splendidly gratuitous sex.