GAME OF THRONES

Over the last few decades, the divide between small screen and the silver screen has been become less defined and blurred. Major talents (from both behind and infront of the camera) have made the move to TV possibly in the hope of avoiding the restrictions that the average 2 hour running time of a movie has.

HBO, now considered the home of quality entertainment, have been branching out of late from their usual faire. Their historic efforts - Band Of Brothers, The Pacific, Boardwalk Empire - have now been joined by the fantasy genre with True Blood and now Game Of Thrones.

An easy, or lazy way of trying to describe it would be to say it's Lord Of The Rings with sex and blood. Yet, with its first season of 10 episodes lasting an hour each, it's so much more.

It has as much cast and sub plots as it does landscape. 7 families battle openly and secretly for the control of Westeros. Some long to sit upon the throne made from the swords of the vanquished. The others have a much more worrying problem with what lies beyond The Wall and the prospect that the horror stories of old from that area aren't stories.

Like the glorious The Walking Dead, ...Thrones has a "how many actors can you spot" cast - Sean Bean as reluctant hero family man Ned Stark; Lena Headey as queen bitch Cersei Lannister; Charles Dance as rich, cold-hearted war strategist Tywin Lannister; Mike Addy as over-weight, out-of-touch King Robert Baratheon. Each gets more than their fair share in the limelight with equal amounts of humour, drama and suspense piled moment-by-moment on top of each other.

Now, I do not wish to ruin the wondrous enjoyment that will be had if you take the journey to Kings Landing and The Wall, but realise this: if you do, will be rewarded with one of the finest surprise sequences of recent TV serial history in episode 9. See it coming you won't.

A delight straight from the start, Game Of Thrones takes far-away drama and lines it with believable back-stabbing politics, sexual intrigue and hints of fictional fantasy with long-forgotten dragons, to make this a piece of work that will appeal to even those who think that they don't do fantasy.

You win or you die.