Blimey, there has been so much good stuff to watch on telly of late: the Grand National, the Boat Race and the Masters; The Island with Bear Grylls; the final of University Challenge (bravura performance from Caius’s Loveday, though how the winning Cambridge team’s hearts must have sunk when they realised that the public intellectual chosen to present this year’s prize was that literary equivalent of a Dalí melting clock poster on a pretentious fifth former’s bedroom wall — Will Self); and, of course, the first episode of the new season’s Game of Thrones (Sky Atlantic, Monday).
I’m assuming you’re all on board with Thrones, now, and that it doesn’t need any introduction. Last season (the fourth) it overtook The Sopranos as the most watched series on HBO, so I imagine that by series 12 or 13 (presuming George R.R. Martin lives to write that many books and doesn’t get eaten in a tragic wolf accident) there will be no one left in the world who hasn’t at some time said to themselves: ‘I am Tyrion Lannister.’
Tyrion — played by the coolest, sex-iest dwarf in history, Peter Dinklage — is, of course, the character everyone wants to be because he’s about the only person in the entire series with a glimmer of human warmth.
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