From the Red Wedding to Dire Wolves via Kings Landing and the Iron Throne: everything you ever wanted to know about Game of Thrones but were afraid to ask

Recalling the first time he watched it, he said: "I was screaming at the television ... It's brave, it's ballsy, it's insane ... everything we've come to expect and love from Game of Thrones."

Barack Obama is such a fan of GoT that he reportedly once asked HBO, the TV network responsible for it, for advance copies on DVD. The series' US audience has been put at 14 million.

Adapted from George R.R. Martin's bestselling series of books, Game of Thrones returns to British TV screens next month for its fifth series.

The world premiere of the first episode takes place in the Tower of London on March 18 at what is promised to be a "red-carpet, star-studded event."

Ahead of the new series, the Sunday Herald plunges into the fictional continent of Westeros to look at why GoT has become such a phenomenon.

* The new fifth series of Game of Thrones launches on April 13 on Sky Atlantic.

SCOTS ACTORS

SOME of them - Kate Dickie, Iain Glen, James Cosmo - were already established stars. Other were less familiar (though that quickly changed). Whatever their status, a handful of Scots actors have found legions of new fans via Game of Thrones.

In addition to Dickie, Glen and Cosmo, GoT has featured Richard Madden (Robb Stark); Rose Leslie (Ygritte); Emun Elliott (Marillion); Ron Donachie (Ser Rodrik Cassel) and Rory McCann (Sandor Clegane).

Rose Leslie, who was raised in her family's ancestral castle in Aberdeenshire, said recently of her role: "I enjoyed revisiting Ygritte every year, as opposed to being one character for four months and never seeing them again. It was as hard to say goodbye to her as it was to the show itself."

Daniel Portman, who plays Podrick Payne in GoT, was taken on four years ago when the show was still a cult success and, "luckily for me" says Portman, was casting unknown actors.

Speaking on STV'S Riverside Show earlier this week, Portman said GoT now claims six months each year. "It's crazy - the time does fly by, to think that it's been four, nearly five years now I've been involved in it."

Asked whether he had any idea, when he joined the cast, that the show would go on to become a global hit, he said: "You have a hope, with HBO. Their stuff's good quality. I've always thought they make a different standard of TV from anyone else on the market.

"It's a difficult one. It's very individual. It might have failed - or, if it was going to fail, it was going to bomb. If it was going to be a success, it was going to be massive."

MERCHANDISE

IT promises to be a far cry from the original version, in which you can buy a hotel on Piccadilly, go to jail and not collect £200.

A Game of Thrones-inspired Monopoly board will be available this year.

The jbgnews.com technology, gaming and entertainment website says it will feature some of GoT's best-known locations, including King's Landing, Castle Black, and Winterfell.

"Players will be able to choose to play as a Three Eyed Raven, a Crown, White Walker, Dragon Egg, a Dire Wolf, and the Iron Throne. Instead of red hotels there will keeps and the green houses will be villages," it adds.

GoT merchandise is huge business. The official HBO shopping page for the series says the bestsellers include ornaments, figurines, T-shirts and metal pins. The season 4 DVD, released earlier this month, became the fastest-selling TV boxset in a decade, shifting more than 157,000 copies in its first week.

The official GoT Twitter page has 2.23 million followers.

TV

SKY Atlantic freely acknowledges that Game of Thrones is its highest-rating show to date.

Now the channel is anticipating impressive audience figures for the new season, which it launches on April 13.

The first episode of the new series will have its world premiere at the Tower of London on March 18 - the first time a GoT world premiere has been held in Europe.

Sky Atlantic Channel Director Zai Bennett said this week: "Reliably unpredictable, every episode of Game of Thrones delivers the irresistible combination of excitement, gripping drama and masterful storytelling, which is why it's become TV's must-see show the world over and Sky Atlantic's highest rating show to date.

"We've seen consistent and substantial growth in audience numbers with each new season, including record numbers on Sky On Demand and Sky Go." In the run-up to season five, fans of GoT can watch every episode from the start with S1-4 Box Sets through Sky On Demand and NOW TV from March 1.

GoT topped Sky's league table of its 10 most-watched box sets of 2014, measured by the average number of views per episode, finishing ahead of such hits as The Walking Dead, Boardwalk Empire, Prison Break, The Following and True Blood.

WILKO JOHNSON

THE charismatic rock guitarist, who made his name with Dr Feelgood in the 1970s, has been one of the more unusual people to appear in GoT.

Johnson, who recently declared that he had been "cured" of the terminal pancreatic cancer with which he was diagnosed in 2012, played Ilyn Payne in the hit series.

Speaking in the new edition of Q! Magazine, Johnson said a casting company had asked him to audition, despite the fact that he had never acted.

"I saw the title and thought it sounded like Xena: Warrior Princess or something," he said. "I thought, 'This will be good - I'll get a leather jacket out of it or something,

"I was the only person they auditioned; they just videoed me reacting to the script because the character doesn't have a tongue.

"The first filming was in Belfast and it was only when I arrived I realised it wasn't some small-time thing! I really enjoyed it, and I didn't have to learn any lines.

"I would have been in the third series but the cancer came along, but they're talking about writing my character back into it."

TOURISM

Scotland missed out on the GoT bonanza despite having the kind of scenery that would make Westeros proud - but our Celtic cousins over the Irish Sea did reap plenty of the dividends.

On a dank Tuesday morning in the middle of January, a luxury coach ferried Game of Thrones fans round some of the many Northern Irish locations used in the series. On board were eleven visitors from Asia, three from north America, and two from Europe. On this one coach, then, was a sterling example of GoT's global popularity.

Much filming for the new series, as well as the previous four, took place in the Paint Hall, part of the eight-acre Titanic Studios, five minutes' drive from the middle of Belfast.

Other GoT locations have included Downhill Beach, on the Causeway Coast; Ballintoy, on the North Antrim Coast; Ballymoney's famous Dark Hedges; and the 820-acre walled demesne of Castle Ward, on Strangford Lough.

The Northern Irish Tourist Board says with understandable pride that HBO had considered no fewer than 14 different countries before choosing Northern Ireland as the principal filming location for GoT.

The extended visits to Northern Ireland of GoT's cast and crew have been hugely beneficial to the local economy.

The first four seasons resulted in a direct economic benefit of £82m to the Northern Ireland economy, including wages for cast and crew, hotels, services and tourism. It had also created the equivalent of more than 900 full-time and 5,700 part-time jobs.

Martin Graham, product development manager at Tourism Northern Ireland, told the Sunday Herald: "Two years ago we had no zero operators on the ground offering (GoT-themed packages] but today we are at Season Five and we have a good seven or eight different experiences and operators operating on the ground with these products.

"There is everything from standard coach-tours round the various locations to an immersive archery experience, where you can pretend you are Jon Snow and try your hand at archery at an actual location where it was filmed, at an historic property."

Possible GoT projects in the pipeline could include a dining experience, where fans in GoT costumes will be able to dine on the same menu that was featured in the King's Banquet. Hopefully, they don't drink the same wine as Joffrey.

One current GoT tour gives fans the chance to "bed down for the night in a "quirky glamping pod" deep in the forest of Winterfell.

Asked why GoT had become so huge, Graham said: "Game of Thrones seems to be like a Lord of the Rings-plus experience; you have the fantasy idea but it's almost like a soap opera set within a fantasy drama, where you have many different characters and feuding families, to say nothing of the blood-and-guts element which people tend to love.

"In a way it is semi-steeped in fact, to the extent that throughout the centuries there were warring families and factions in opposition to each other. There's the swordplay, which isn't necessarily fictitious."

Throughout the series' lifespan, he added, people have been arriving, disappearing and dying. "There's an underlying thread where it is really like a medieval soap opera in a way, but obviously with fantastic production values, and big names drawn from other, different genres."

Not that Northern Ireland is the only setting for GoT. In the recent words of the Den of Geek website: "Game Of Thrones is already a global enterprise, with units regularly filming in Croatia, Iceland, Northern Ireland and more. Another European country, Spain, is the latest to be added to that list, standing in for the Iberian-tinged coastal desert region of Dorne."

The Scottish film industry is still licking its wounds - like a injured Dire Wolf.

Speaking last month to Holyrood's Economy Committee, Drew McFarlane, national organiser of trade union Equity in Scotland and Northern Ireland, said Game Of Thrones had considered filming in Scotland, but added: "It didn't come here because we didn't have a body pushing hard enough. We have two public quangos who don't seem to take a lead from each other.

"Game Of Thrones looked at the infrastructure which is sadly lacking. I think the public bodies have got to answer that one."