“A great radio play is a wonderful thing – it can conjure an entire world out of thin air.” So says Sebastian Baczkiewicz, prolific radio dramatist, and the creator of this enduring fantasy drama, of which there have been nine series since it launched in 2010. Pilgrim starts in the year 1185, and tells of the wanderings of its title character William Palmer (Paul Hilton) between magical worlds and mortal worlds, the tale evolving over centuries, with Palmer obliged to carry out a series of quests. Magical stuff indeed.

Fantasy tale of a hero cursed with immortality. Listen on BBC Sounds

While much scholarship has focused on BBC radio drama of the first half of the 20^th century, very little to date has dealt seriously with the first decades of the 21^st century. Sebastian Baczkiewicz’s Pilgrim debuted on BBC Radio 4 in 2008.

Splinter Cell continues to receive international  plaudits. The great and prolific Paul Cornell and I were jointly awarded the Scribe Awards at the Comic Con in San Diego for our adaptation! While James Swallow picked up an award for Firewall from whence same adaptation was made.

One of the producers and the director of Splinter Cell is Nadia Molinari who I’d done all my previous Radio 4 work with and she asked for me for this. I think, me and Sebastian [Baczkiewicz] were both regarded as safe pairs of hands because they didn’t have very long at all to get this done. The gap between Ubisoft saying ‘Yes you can do this’ and it needing to be on air wasn’t very long at all. So we both dived in and did it.

Splinter Cell: Firewall is an eight part dramatisation of a novel based on the famous video game franchise.

Sebastian Baczkiewicz, who adapted the Firewall story for Radio 4 and BBC Sounds, hopes that just because this is a story based on a gaming franchise, it won’t be pigeonholed as something for younger listeners only: “Trying to reach new audiences is always part of what we do and hopefully this will find an audience”.