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
1989 Sino-Soviet Summit massive student protests in the Chinese capital. Nonetheless, neither side proposed to postpone or reschedule the meeting. Gorbachev refused to pass judgement on the student protests in hopes that the Chinese leaders and the student protesters would resolve their differences by themselves. Even though the demonstrations disrupted the reception of the Soviet delegation and many of the social events of the visit were cancelled, Gorbachev was still very pleased with the reception in Beijing as well as the summit as a whole as he was able to accomplish his goal of normalizing relations. According to political scientist, William Taubman, even