Less said, the better

I've been absolutely unable to stop myself from ingesting a lot of excellent children's TV in the past couple of years, and it's all lovely - Sarah & Duck is eternally sweet; the Bluey episode where Bingo dreams about floating through the planets is monumentally moving; there's a local effort called Moe and Friends which is totally adorable; and Hey Duggie had a joke about the severed heads in Apocalypse Now, for cripes sake.

All these kids stuff has also reignited my long-held belief that people who can tell stories without using dialogue are absolute geniuses.

The team behind several seasons - and at least two movies - starring Shaun the Sheep, in particular, are just brilliant. With no dialogue more than grunts, groans and the odd 'wey-hey!, they tell complicated narratives that are still so easy to follow. It doesn't have the wickedly good dialogue of the Wallace and Gromit, but Shaun is no lesser Aardman, and the way they convey information and tell a story without a single line is stunning.

Film nerds have always had an obsession with clever dialogue, but a film or TV show that can tell a story without that kind of language can be even more impressive. Rififi is rightly remembered for its silent heist, and there are hundreds of great silent films that tell their immortal tales with few cue cards, (and some exceptional stunts, don't ever forget the stunts). 

Arnie only gets a dozen lines of dialogue in The Terminator, because he was all about the physical presence, and the Mad Max films know you don't need words to rev up the intensity. The roadrunner cartoons are timeless and can be understood by everybody, and you can find similar dialogue-free thrills in contemporary stuff like Grizzy and the Lemmings, a French cartoon full of glorious gibberish.

That's the real strength of the cutting out the spoken language - everyone can follow them, from any age, all over the world.

When it comes to telling those stories, getting around the restrictions inevitably imposed by a lack of dialogue does take genuine talent and skill. But there will always be mind-numbingly boring dipshits who sneer at the silence and will come at you with graphs and everything, proving that there was less dialogue in the later season of Game of Thrones, and how this was objectively worse.

(And yeah, I'm still annoyed how lack of any dialogue for half an hour in the ultimate battle between the living and the dead is a dumb bug, not a glorious feature.)

But to tell the story with no dialogue, where it's just not necessary, is so much harder than it looks, and so disrespected. Because I don't need to now what Blitzer is saying, cos I always know what he's doing.