In April 1998, when the Good Friday Agreement was announced in Belfast, sealing the peace process in Northern Ireland, its signatories could not have imagined that they were helping to make broadcasting as well as political history.
But part of the region’s cultural and economic post-Troubles recovery was the setting up of Northern Ireland Screen, a government-backed agency encouraging international film and television producers to use as locations Belfast and the mountains, woods, rivers and beaches beyond.
The organisation hoped to find a franchise that might do for employment and tourism in Ulster what the Lord of the Rings films had done for New Zealand. And the dream was achieved when, in 2011, the American TV network HBO began production of a series called Game of Thrones at Titanic Studios, based in the shipyards where the doomed ocean-liner had been built.
It was a clever move by HBO because the Northern Irish landscape was beautifully ancient without being distractingly familiar to global audiences in the way that the terrain of America or the Antipodes might have been.
The Belfast production base also gave an advantage in the casting. Game of Thrones has learned from the Harry Potter and Tolkien films that British classical actors in cameo roles lend an extra heft to fantasy scripts, so Diana Rigg, Jonathan Pryce, Anton Lesser and Julian Glover were among those flown in across the Irish Sea to play featured roles in the series.
The overall budget was helped, though, by the choice in the lead roles of British actors such as Kit Harington and Michelle Fairley and the American Peter Dinklage, who, at the time, were fairly unknown.
This reflects a decision to position the series as an overall brand – aimed at the large fan base that the George RR Martin source books already had – rather than relying on big-name actors to draw audiences. In Game of Thrones, the story is the star.
A clue to why the show has now won more awards than any other fiction series in the history of the Emmys can be seen in the other series that took home trophies this year – Veep (about politics), The People vs OJ Simpson (race), Bloodline (violence), and Downton Abbey (history).
Politics, race, history and violence thrive in the plot lines of Game of Thrones, which also features large amounts of a commodity that has rarely driven audiences away – sex. The latter has made the show hugely popular with teenage libidos in males of all ages, although it has also brought justified criticism of the show’s sometimes casual attitudes to female nudity and, in one controversial scene, rape.
This is a Lord of The Rings but with more blood, lust and intrigue.
