TV Review: Game of Thrones, Once Upon a Time, Silent Witness

IT’S the top gig in TV continuity announcing, the one they all want. “... with very strong language, violence, adult themes, sexual scenes and flashing images.” Yes, Give Us A Clue was back, the classic Lionel Blair-Una Stubbs version. I’m kidding, it was season two of Game Of Thrones.

I love the omnipotence of GOT. HBO’s medieval fantasy epic battering-rams its way back into the schedules without so much as a by your leave or a “Previously…” No need to remind the serfs and varlets what happened last time; just give them more of what they want. In the opening seconds there was fighting to the death on some battlements, much enjoyed by the camp young psycho-king Joffrey – “Well struck, dog!” – who then ordered a knight, slightly the worse for drink, to be funnelled mead from a flagon until he too had expired, only to spare him and appoint him as his fool.

This is a show which mildly torments its audience by lingering on the minutiae of council affairs, safe in the knowledge we won’t switch over because before long there will be a beheading or an orgy or better still a beheading at an orgy.

This is a show unafraid to call one of the key territories King’s Landing, even though it sounds like Knots Landing (Dallas spin-off for the dullest Ewing half-breeds) or even a Barratt estate. For this is where to come if you like recurring wolf dreams, incest, dwarves, Wicker Man-type burnings and dialogue that burns like the gaudiest stones on the most ostentatious crown on view (and there are many, as someone remarks: “A king in every corner now”).

“You smell of fear, piss and bones …” “I don’t need a servant to do my beheading for me…” “Any man who lays a hand on one of my wives loses a hand.” And best of all in the first episode: “I’ve always had a hard time trusting eunuchs – who knows what they want?”

As I’ve said before, dramas featuring so many lances and longswords are not usually my thing, but Game Of Thrones is just too thrilling to waste any more time trying to identify the moments when it reminds you of Monty Python. Plus, the dragons are brilliant. If all you knew while growing up were stop-motion serpents and Plasticine plesiosaurs (One Million Years BC, The Lost World, black-and-white version) you’d think so too.

I upset Robert Carlyle once. Not a smart move if you believe that there’s a little bit of the man in every role he plays (Trainspotting, Cracker). He didn’t like my review of his film Once Upon A Time In The Midlands so I’ll try to be kinder about Once Upon A Time, a new drama which flips between a fairytale world populated by Snow White, Jiminy Cricket, etc, and the all-too-real one of sassy but lonely Emma, let down by the men she meets on the internet, and a storybook-loving smart kid (Jared Gilmore, little Bobby Draper in Mad Men), who’s unhappy at home and turns up one day claiming she’s his birth mum.

Well, the fantasy stuff pales next to Game Of Thrones, but this would be true of any rival show right now. It doesn’t have “adult themes”, being aimed at families, but even so I reckon today’s youngsters would expect an edgier take on fairytales and for these scenes to be a good bit darker. I quite like the contemporary stuff, and maybe quite soon the two worlds will collide and Once Upon A Time will get a whole lot more interesting.

Carlyle, by the way, turns up in both – as a Rumpelstiltskin who, remembering Begbie, you could say had based his look on a foot-of-Leith-Walk gentleman of leisure, and as Mr Gold, owner of the town of Storybrooke, who after delivering just the one line is already much scarier. I tell you, the man’s a genius.

“Perhaps we are not meant to do this job forever,” said Nikki (Emilia Fox), early on in the returning Silent Witness, pondering how the death of a loved one can stop you thinking about the corpses you see every day. I say early on, but five stiffs had been racked up by that point. One was a boy, the same age as the lad in Once Upon A Time, and the sight of him pinned to a post with a bicycle lock round his neck and a plastic bag over his head made me yearn for those fairytales, however fluffy.

Unfortunately, Nikki, you will have to be a pathologist for ever – possibly longer – because there’s no sign of our TV bloodlust abating and Silent Witness will surely record the death of the last man standing. «