On the press circuit for the season two DVD release, Dance, who plays Game Of Thrones’ villainous patriarch Tywin Lannister, revealed that he’s off to film the fourth season later this year, with six of the scripts he’ll be working from seemingly already written.

Sandwiched between heart-felt praise for the talents of writer/director duo DB Weiss and David Benioff were these words from Mr Dance:

“We’re about to start season four aren’t we? This year. We get scripts pretty early on, much earlier on than in similar series, usually you get perhaps one episode and you just have to trust that what’s going to come in subsequent episodes is going to be as good as the one you’ve got, but in this I think there are six scripts already written, and we will probably be able to see them with more than adequate time to prepare before we start shooting.”

Entertainingly, as soon as the words "season four" left Charles Dance's mouth, the panel moderator signalled his panic with a few swift knocks to the table top, a message Dance happily talked though. At the end of the junket, a representative from HBO came in to remind us all of the fact that season four has not been officially green-lit.