We're So Bad - The Army Of Dad

The British Are Strange
This comes as no surprise to Continentals, who have long suspected that a diet of fog, bitter and chips is bound to produce what are politely called "eccentricities" and, less politely, "weirdoes safely behind a water barrier".
     One of the aspects of British peculiarity is their celebration of ineptness, failure and poor performance, because - Damn it all don't you know! - it's just not the done thing to boast about being successful.

Note the severe lack of comedy TV programmes set post D-Day

     Hence we come to that programme hinted at in the title, "Dad's Army".  Conrad sits back in bemusement at i) how this programme was pitched and ii) how the Beeb ever gave it the green light*.
     Imagine the scene.  There's Jimmy Perry sitting in front of Billy Cotton.

     JP:  Okay, it's July 1940.  The British army has been brought back from Dunkirk, but without anything bar what men can carry. It's a defeat.
     BC:  Okay, okay, I get it.  Establishing the scene.
     JP:  Right!  Europe has been over-run by Nazi Germany, Britain stands alone, expecting invasion at any moment.  Hitler is triumphant.
     BC:  It sounds grim!
     JP:  The Army is stretched too thin to cope, it needs re-equipping with desperate urgency, there's no weapons to go round for anyone else.
     BC: My God, this is awful!
     JP:  Then the Home Guard is formed, and the programme will be a comedy about them.
     BC:  Sold!  Here's a cheque for £5,000.**
     Whilst the Home Guard might be gently mocked in "Dad's Army", it is unwise to underestimate them.  They might "only" be armed with shotguns, yet have you ever seen anyone get up again after taking a couple of barrels of buckshot to the solar plexus?  Not as a human being, I assure you.  Nor is that all.  A large number of the HG were veterans of the First Unpleasantness, with a bloody-minded attitude towards fighting and a frightening fondness for the bayonet.

They do, indeed, not like it up them.

"Machicolations"
I do bet your pardon, this is another word that popped into my mind for no good reason, except that to make sense of it, you need to know about corbels first.
     These two sound like arcane examinations that those frightfully posh Cambridge students sit:  "Oh yes don't you know, old Featheringsted, frightful duffer, failed his Machicolations, got sent down as a result." Or, "Ah yes, I got a blue in my Corbels, led the whole team to victory."
     Sadly not so.  Corbels, you see, are projections from the battlements of a castle.  High up.  At the bottom of the battlements would be redundant.

Corbels***.

     So, there are the battlements, with corbels.  Now, if you were a medieval architect, seething with inner hatred for your fellow humans, and you notice that your castle design has corbels, what do you do?
     You add machicolations!  Nicknamed "murder holes", they are - and you may already be ahead of me here - holes at the bottom of the corbel.  Art?

Eh voila

     Remember that seething inner hatred?  Well, machicolations allow you to work this off by dropping rocks, molten pitch or boiling oil on anyone below who exhibits hostile intent.

I Worry In My Bones About Game Of Thrones
More specifically, about Westeros and that other place, the East End or whatever.  
     "Why, whatever can you mean, Conrad!" I hear you leer, your eyes glazing over at the prospect of yet another season of swords, sex and sewing needles.
     I worry because this culture does not seem able to progress from Squalid Licentiousness, underpinned by Turmoil and funded by a multi-national financial conglomerate with the soul of a potato.  

The Iron Bank's Community Rep

     If you recollect, our own Middle Ages^ were triumphantly ended by the Renaissance, where the literature and architecture of classical antiquity were rediscovered, alongside humanism and the printing press.  "Standing on the shoulders of giants" is how the new cognoscenti of early modern Europe described themselves, acknowledging their debt to Hellenic and Roman civilisation, to Arabic scholars and the Byzantine empire.

Hellenic art: an inspiration to Morecambe and Wise
(See below)

     Does Westeros have any such historical underpinning to rediscover?  Hardly.  "The First Men" appear to have been barely at the Neolithic level, their highest technological achievement is a pointy stone; all that the current kings and pretenders are interested in is mass slaughter, whilst these folk would only stand on a giant's shoulders in order to bury an axe in his head.  
     I despair, I really do.

Finally -
I said the British were strange.

Celebrating the Renaissance, obviously

* This is historical, right, so it's not violating our No Current Affairs policy, right?
**  A lot of money in those days.
*** No silly puns here.
^  In Europe, where history grows.