Game of Thrones returns for the third series

The usual line about HBO’s Game of Thrones, which returned for its third series last night, is what a surprise its success has been. Aside from The Lord of the Rings, the thinking goes, audiences have always been resistant to grand fantasy. So it is strange that the programme, based on George RR Martin’s bestselling books, is Sky Atlantic’s most popular, and has drawn millions of unexpected fans: housewives and historians, as well as the expected men with beards.
But really we shouldn’t be surprised that the British love it. Our nation after all has been raised on childish versions of fantasy, from Narnia to Hogwarts to Wonderland. The difference is that where those other creations take recognisable worlds and fill them with strange happenings, Thrones invents a strange continent and populates it with the kind of grim brutality familiar to anyone who has studied real history. There is sex, violence or intrigue in every scene, shown in gruesome detail.
The action is set in a vaguely medieval continent, Westeros, about the size of South America, where factions vie for the throne. To the north, beyond a 700ft ice wall, walk wild men and the undead. Across the sea to the East, an heir is raising baby dragons to help her eventual reconquest of the area.
When the series began, the continent was relatively peaceful. Twenty episodes later, as we saw last night, it is a seething hell. We were taken around the kingdoms, catching up on each character. It wasn’t pretty. Nearly everyone has been subjected to grave injury or injustice.
Take the Starks, nominally the series’ heroes. When the curtain lifted in 2011 they were a happy family: mother, father, six children, living in an idealised version of Northumberland. Then the father had his head chopped off at the end of series one, and things have been downhill since, as last night reminded us. In the new episode we saw the eldest son leading an army in retributive civil war. He was keeping his mother captive, as punishment for releasing an enemy prisoner. Daughter one had been jilted by a psychopathic sadist of a king, daughter two was missing presumed dead. Son two, a bastard, was with the wild men in the north. Son three was half-paralysed, and on the run with son four who was too young to know what’s going on.