When you tackle said contest, you win or you die – or you churn out scenes of sexual exploitation until you become creatively bankrupt

This time last year, I stupidly put my Game of Thrones beer mug in the dishwasher. When I took it out, the words “Winter is coming” and the show’s logo had disappeared. Only the image of a snarling direwolf remained. It was a sign.

Later that day, I read the recap to the denouement of last season’s finale, which posed the following conundrum: “The question now is how much has Sansa learnt – will she decide it’s better to be the lady of Winterfell and the power behind Jon’s throne ... or will she listen to Littlefinger’s attempts to spread discord?” No, I realised, that was not the question. The question was: why I had ever cared about this guff? How had I cared for so long about which claimant would install their derriere on the Iron Throne, be they Ye Lannisters of the Westerlands, Ye Greyjoys of the Iron Islands, or Ye Lentil-Weaving Guardian Readers of Islington North?

I’d been suckered into the franchise five years earlier by a scene adapted straight from George RR Martin’s original novel. A sweet little boy, Bran Stark, was climbing a tower when he saw something he shouldn’t have. He glimpsed Jaime and Cersei, smouldering Lannister siblings, in an incestuous clinch. Jaime pushed the boy to the stones yards below, which is why Bran spent the rest of the drama being carried around by a linguistically challenged giant.

The scene typified for me two things. One: how Martin’s brutally bravura plot twists were thrillingly realised by showrunners David Benioff and DB Weiss. Two: how unfitted I’d be living in the cod-medieval mash-up Martin had created. I would not, for instance, be able to stand to attention as one of my nipples was sliced off to prove my readiness for battle. But even those bracing pleasures curdle. When did this good TV turn bad for me? It was around the time some sex worker glumly pleasured a hard-faced descendant of some decadent ancient king for the umpteenth time. I was getting tired of being implicated in that exploitative scenario week after week. Or when Dany emerged naked from the fire, a CGI dragon landed on her shoulder, and looked off into the middle distance towards Westeros, where she would fulfil her manifest destiny. Or when yet another British thesp slummed into shot (Stephen Dillane, I’ve seen you in Beckett; you’re better than this!).

It’s hard to be precise. It took me a while to realise how right Ian McShane was when he described Game of Thrones as “only tits and dragons”, by which he meant, surely, formulaic hokum that degrades its viewers by commodifying women’s bodies, making entertainment out of sexual torture and pimping up its spectacles.

To clinch that last point, Benioff recently teased season seven by boasting that in one battle scene he and his team had “set more stuntmen on fire than have ever been simultaneously set on fire”. One headline glossed this remark thus: “Game of Thrones Decided to Set Even More People on Fire This Season, Because Sure, Why Not”.

Why not? Gee, you’d think, because of the law of diminishing returns. Life is short and Game of Thrones, like many TV franchises, is too long, stuck in its ways, creatively bankrupt. It’s projected to carry on until 2019 then, doubtless, will diversify into spin-offs. But I’m gone.