Recently, I’ve found that I can’t go for a pint without losing hours of my life. It’s not the booze. It’s that every time I go out, someone insists that I really should be watching some must-see television series or other. Homeland, The Bridge, Smash: my digi-box is bursting at the seams. Yet there’s one series, above all, that keeps coming up: Game of Thrones, HBO’s ultra-high-budget swords-and-sorcery epic, now midway through its second series on Sky Atlantic. All sorts of people – after mumbling about how fantasy normally isn’t their kind of thing – are confessing that they’re addicted.