Game Of Thrones saved my bacon!
. . . says the pig farmer whose rare animals star in the show
THE battle for the Iron Throne is a bloody one: in the hit TV series Game Of Thrones few survive from one series to the next – and even fewer prosper.
But as season five begins tomorrow night, one man has done both. He’s no red-carpet star, or even a lucky extra. He’s pig farmer Kenny Gracey and it’s fair to say the global smash-hit fantasy epic has saved his bacon after the credit crunch left his rare-breeds business struggling to survive.
For the herds of ‘medieval’ pigs seen on the drama’s twin continents of Westeros and Essos are Kenny’s. So, too, are the sheep, Joey the donkey, Suzie the goat, Yana the red deer and the plump red hens that scratch around in village scenes.
His two Irish wolfhound-deerhound crosses, Murphy and Hennessy, make their screen debut in the new series. And much of the ancient farm equipment – the rusty chains, horse collars, anvils, mangers and troughs – that dress the Northern Ireland sets were salvaged from teetering piles of scrap in Kenny’s junk-filled barns where it had been gathering dust for decades.
They’ve even called on the married farmer’s butchery skills – usually devoted to making bacon and sausages on the 45-acre Forthill Farm near Tandragee in Co. Armagh, the Gracey family home since 1710. When Charles Dance’s character Tywin Lannister had to skin a stag, it was Kenny who gave him a 90minute crash course.
The unlikely story of how an Armagh pig man bet his farm on television’s hottest property with around 18 million weekly viewers began in 2010. By then the credit crunch was crippling the business Kenny started in 1992, and he was weighed down with debt.
He says: ‘I got a call out of the blue from a props buyer who’d heard about my hoard of old farm bits and pieces. She popped in for 30 minutes and left five hours later. Two days later I sent a lorry load to the set. Occasionally Kenny gets into costume and appears on the show, if his animals need a helping hand on set. ‘It’s been a godsend,’ he says. So is he a Games Of Thrones fan? ‘I’m still trying to watch series one.’