Grace Dent
Hit pirates where it hurts – with spoilers
As the first four episodes of Game
of Thrones Season 5 leaked online during the weekend, it was little surprise to me that British pirates downloaded – or stole, to put it bluntly – more copies than anyone else in the world. Reports say 9.8 per cent of all illegal downloads recorded were in the UK.
We Brits are madly, deeply in love with the other-worldly fantasy saga which draws on a mishmash of Roman, Plantagenet, Tudor and Stuart influences. Power-hungry queens war with mad kings, while a northern wall wards off “wildlings”. Biting winters provide a backdrop to smutty serfs and nigh-constant treachery, tyranny and torture. It all means there is nothing quite as British – oddly enough – as the American television powerhouse Game of Thrones.
So I laughed this weekend when tech experts said the leaking of four spankingnew Game of Thrones episodes would provide a moral dilemma. Morals? On the internet? Excuse me while I laugh up some spleen. As downloads of the Game
of Thrones plunder reached more than 800,000, it was evident, yet again, that the internet has the morals of a bloke you meet in a happy hour in Tenerife who sticks his hand up your frock, steals your credit card then promises to call. Fans wanted to see all-new Game of
Thrones right then, right now. The fact that this was plain theft, or that it might offend lots of their beloved actors, producers and TV bigwigs made no difference. Morals? Ethics? Who are you, the Dalai Llama? It was the weekend, time for some “me time”, and Game of Thrones fans – with Britain topping the list for thievery – wanted to shove all four episodes instantly into their greedy, snaffling eyeholes.
So bloody what if four hours later they might feel a bit sick and discombobulated, like kids on a school trip who had gorged their entire packed lunch – Jaffa cakes, pork pies, Kia-Ora, the lot – two miles outside of the school gates. And so what if HBO lavish around $10m making each episode – which is precisely what makes it such a peerless TV experience in the first place. And no, of course we wouldn’t run into a Vue cinema without paying, watch four movies backto-back without paying, and then flick two fingers up at the usher. That would be illegal.
But this is the internet stupid: millions of us believe we have the right to take whatever the hell we want. And if we’re pondering world history – as Game of
Thrones author George RR Martin’s Westeros clearly does – it’s rather fitting that the British come top of the charts in the Game of Thrones smash and grab.
After all, one of Martin’s greatest creations, King Joffrey, is a petulant, bloodthirsty child sociopath with a cut-glass British accent. This acidic little toff – part Battle of the Boyne, part Bullingdon Club – wants everything instantly. Land, gold, women, the moon on a stick. His magpie eyes have seen the prize and he’ll enslave or
This is the internet – where millions feel they have the right to take what they want
kill anyone in his path. When international audiences go wild for the privileged, plundering Joffrey, part of me feels proud, certainly, that we still corner the market in creating fictional baddies who put the heebie-jeebies up the rest of the world. But I also can’t help feeling it’s not doing a great deal to shake our reputation.
Still, one good thing about modern internet users losing sight of the definition of “theft” – or while we’re at it “voyeurism”, “lynch mobbing”, or “slander” – is that we’re putting in place other strict moral boundaries. One of the worst moral crimes one can commit on the internet today is dropping “spoilers” which ruin the enjoyment of other people’s TV, film or literature experience.
We might turn a blind eye to someone robbing four whole episodes of a very expensively made and well-loved TV show, but if the thief then sidles up to us tomorrow at the office water cooler to blurt out that Sir Wotsit is strangled in episode two, or a dragon has a poorly paw in episode four, our wrath will be mighty and unyeilding. Spoiling Game of Thrones, for even the most fleeting of fans, is akin – morality wise – to stealing charity boxes for sick orphans from shop counters, or kicking grannies up the bum outside Mecca Bingo. You just don’t do it.
We have grown, in recent times, so thoroughly precious about our lives being “spoiled” – with the boundaries growing ever larger – that mentioning EastEnders,
Match of the Day, a Bond film from 1977, or a BBC comedy that plays 10 times a day on UK Gold has become socially tricky. When I recently wrote about the BBC’s Easter production of Noah’s Ark, I seriously considered whether revealing that the whole thing ends with a massive flood might spoil the Book of Genesis for people who had not got round to reading it.
So it’s ironic that viewers who downloaded and then guzzled up the new Game of
Thrones episodes without a speck of guilt are now in their very own modern purgatory, not able to speak or emit a single word or squeak about them. For the braggard and the big gob, surely this is punishment enough. Of course, when entertainment companies send lawyers to these sorts of people, it’s customary for the illegal downloader to curl up like a slug and play the “Ooh look! David is shafting Goliath! Poor me!” card, so that no side eventually “wins”. If I was HBO, I’d employ a team of professional spoilers who instead of suing or looking for prison terms, would simply spend the next 10 years tracking what individual downloaders were watching, allow them to get thoroughly engrossed, then send anonymous messages, revealing whodunnit and spoiling the big plot twist. It’s not five years in Wormwood Scrubs, but to a lot of people it really would be punishment enough.