Game of Thrones premiere at the Tower of London, review: the pride before the fall

Television is in a golden age. Or at least so we are told. If you weren’t able to tell from the quality of the programming, the decadence of the parties would give the game away. With the vast budgets of HBO, Netflix and the like – the box-set barons that have usurped the grand Hollywood studios – big series now mean serious hospitality. This kind of pride usually comes before a fall, or at least some lukewarm reviews.

Things are getting out of hand. The House of Cards premiere last month involved a whole hotel and a room full of pudding. Never to be outdone in matters of size, the epic fantasy series Game of Thrones marked the start of its fifth season by taking over the Tower of London and erecting a 1,000-seat cinema in its moat. Last year the premiere was at the Guildhall and the year before that it was in an old church crypt in Marylebone.