Norma Percy the MP John Mackintosh, who recommended her to the Granada Television producer Brian Lapping when he was looking for a researcher for a documentary on the workings of Parliament called "The State of the Nation". Percy produced the Granada series "End of Empire" (1985), which explored the effects of the end of the British Empire in various former colonies, and worked with Lapping on the 1987 drama-documentary "Breakthrough at Reykjavik", a reconstruction of the Reykjavík Summit between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev in 1986. After fifteen years at Granada, Percy joined the newly formed production company Brian Lapping Associates in
Presidency of Ronald Reagan Soviet Union cooperated on international issues such as the Iran–Iraq War. When Reagan visited Moscow for a fourth summit with Gorbachev in 1988, he was viewed as a celebrity by the Soviets. A journalist asked the president if he still considered the Soviet Union the evil empire. "No," he replied, "I was talking about another time, another era." At Gorbachev's request, Reagan gave a speech on free markets at the Moscow State University. In December 1988, Gorbachev effectively renounced the Brezhnev Doctrine, paving the way for democratization in Eastern Europe. In November 1989, ten months after Reagan left office, the