Game of Thrones season 4: The wild wild Westeros

If you are a Game of Thrones fan you have to navigate all sorts of bores in your daily round.

There are the ones who want to tell you how the books are better, or the books are different, or anything just to let you know that they've read the books. Then there are the critters who have already downloaded tonight's episode, and so wiggle their noses smugly and say: "I won't give you any spoilers". Worst of all , the varmints who pronounce: "Over-rated! It's just a soap opera."

Of course it's a soap opera. Dynastic history is also a soap opera, if you tell it properly, and all the great tales of kingdoms and their fates. But this is a splendidly unsentimental soap opera with grand themes and plotting and dialogue and gorgeous locations. Plus, it has dragons, and dragons always settle the argument.

The other good thing about Game of Thrones is it gives me a sneak peek at how life will be when I'm senile and slightly Alzheimerish. Each episode is a passing parade of familiar faces whose names escape me. I keep demanding, like a querulous old man in a cinema: "Who's he? Do we know why he did that?" For the most part, it doesn't matter; it's just a colourful wash of spectacle and cruelty and intrigue, like life's bright, dark, saucy rich pageant.

Two weeks ago there was a wedding, which always bodes ill in Westeros. The annoying King Joffrey was poisoned, to our delight, but also our disappointment, because turning slightly purple and whimpering for your mommy is a bad way to go but not quite bad enough. I'd have preferred to see him forced to digest himself in a bucket of his own gastric juices, but hey ho.

"Killing a man at a wedding?" tuts Diana Rigg, playing a kind of medieval Maggie Smith. "As though men need more reasons to be afraid of marriage!"

Tyrion, the Dorothy Parkerish midget who gets all the best lines, is blamed but his wife is spirited away to a creaking wooden ship moored in the misty narrow seas commanded by . Littlefinger! Yes, Littlefinger has returned! Wait - Littlefinger's back? I didn't know he'd left. Why's he called "Littlefinger" anyway? Littlefinger is clearly scheming something, because he's always scheming something, and also because he keeps speaking like Kaa the snake.

In the sands of a desert somewhere Daenerys Stormborn is marching like a lissom Helen Zille, all in blue with a brown army behind her and dragons at her shoulders. In the north, the wildlings have teamed up with some pale-faced cannibals and are killing everyone, and the gormless Jon Snow might be next.

Meanwhile, dead Ned Stark's feisty 12-year-old daughter is also travelling north, I think, or maybe south, with a big waffle-faced roughneck called The Hound. I don't know where they're going, or exactly why, but they're having many adventures along the way, and if she doesn't end up King of Westeros one day, I'll want to know the reason why.

Back at King's Landing there is an impressive polysexual orgy involving Oberin, Prince of Dorne, and his paramour, Ellaria Sand.

In perhaps the most Games of Thronish moment ever, Jaime, the one-handed regicide, rejects the demand of his evil sister, Cersei, to kill their brother, and instead rapes her beside the dead body of the psychopathic fruit of their incestuous love.

If that doesn't sound like something you'd watch, it's probably best you don't. For the rest of us, Friday night is time for GoT with a GnT.

• Game of Thrones is on M-Net, DStv 101, on Fridays at 9.30pm