The sad decline of my one-time favourites

I don’t think it’s my imagination: it really is getting harder and harder to find anything worth watching on TV. But then, why should it be otherwise? Entropy has afflicted every aspect of our culture from holiday flights to the supply chain to the efficacy and integrity of our political and legal system to the quality of pop singles, so we should hardly be surprised if the quality of material on the gogglebox has taken a dive too.

One metric of this is the decline in quality of long-running TV series. Game of Thrones was not the exception but the rule. Even the series I sometimes consider to be the best thing ever on TV – Sky’s Gomorrah – became simply unwatchable by its fifth and final season. This was also pretty much true of another old favourite of mind, The Last Kingdom.

Somehow – gritting my teeth and getting the Fawn to bind me to the armchair and pin my eyelids open with needles helped – I managed to make it through to the very final episode on Netflix.