Five years ago, if you had told us that the whole world, ourselves included, would become obsessed with a show with dragons and magic in it, we'd have told you to get the boat.

However Game of Thrones has fast become everyone's favourite TV show, and as anyone who watches it will tell you, it's about so much more than dragons and magic, although Drogon is a bit of a legend.

You can imagine though how difficult it must have been to try pitch this show to a network, obviously the books were hugely popular for years, but could it ever really successfully translate to TV?

This was the question on HBO Head Richard Plepler's mind as he stewed over whether or not to give the green light to a show that was nothing like the network had ever done before.

He spoke recently at The New York Times’s New Work Summit where he said how showrunner David Benioff convinced him to give the show a go;

"So I was very nervous after I read the pilot script for Thrones because I was a little concerned that it was off brand,” he said. “We’d never done sci-fi [wut?] in any form, I was worried that it was very expensive. The BBC had dropped out, they were going to co-finance the pilot. So it meant that the whole cost burden was on us.

"Benioff came in and confronted it head on and said ‘Look, I understand you’re a little concerned. You think it’s a little off brand.'” Plepler remembers. “I said I did. He said ‘Well, let me try to allay your concern. Number one: you’re a political junkie, right?’ And I said I am. He said ‘All this is is archetypal power. That’s all this is, a story of power. Number two: you’ll forget where you are in the first 15 minutes. You could be in 10th century England, you could be in 5th century … you’ll just forget where you are.

"Then he looked at me and he said ‘I have wrestled with this for the past two years. I understand it, I feel it, I breathe it. There are very few things in my life that I would devote the next eight to ten years to, and this is one of them. And I won’t let you down.'"

Safe to say, that he did not.

You can watch the interview below;