I’ve never watched Game Of Thrones – and I never will

Why would I spend 65 hours catching up?

If there’s one thing I hate, it’s being late to the party. Not just, like, an actual IRL party, when all the booze has been drunk and the cheese plate is a miserable void, accessorised with a smear of sweaty pickle, a couple of wrinkled grapes and half a Babybel – but the kind of pop-cultural happening that the whole world and their labradoodle is involved with. Prime examples include: working out that Justin Bieber’s ‘Sorry’ is actually a modern masterpiece, deciding that Tom Hardy is indeed the most desirable man in the universe and getting heavily into The Wire, which I watched when it was still a relative secret, with DVDs covertly passed around between me and my mates who all became hugely obsessed with the Baltimore underworld – and the docks, especially the docks. Damn it, remember the docks.

So, after six years of bloodlust, incest and murder – them, not me, I’m not a monster – this is the reason why I’ve still not seen a single episode of Game Of Thrones. When the show began, back in 2011, I was fully ensconced in my Mad Men addiction. Don Draper’s sharp suits, Joan Holloway’s sass and Peggy Olson’s nascent feminism were my telly crack, alongside lashings of Parks And Recreation and – I’m not ashamed to say – a fair wallop of Downton Abbey. The following year brought with it Lena Dunham’s groundbreaking Girls, the year after that Orange Is The New Black, and by then, we were three seasons deep into Game Of Thrones. I’d already made the mistake of trying to get into Breaking Bad too late and made it through just half an episode before the threat of all those hours looming ahead of me gave me severe box-set-induced anxiety. Which is a shame, really, because it really does sound like something I’d enjoy.

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I’m a big fan of flagrant nudity and I’ve always had a soft spot for dragons and gruffly spoken folk from Yorkshire, but the fact that I’d have to promise 65 hours of my life to it to get up to date scares me deeply. Call it a commitment issue if you want. You would be entirely correct.

I was kind of alright with living a chaste televisual life, unfettered by the goings on of Westeros, but over the past few weeks it’s become clear to me that I am one of literally only three people in NME Towers who doesn’t watch the show, leaving me blank in the face of the endless chatter about it. And if there’s one other thing I don’t like, it’s being left out of endless chatter, which I consider one of my strengths. Hmm, I suppose 65 hours is only just under three days…

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