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
Mark Phillips (journalist) in 1982, Phillips moved to the United States, and joined CBS News as a reporter for the network's London bureau and covered events throughout Europe, the Middle East and Africa. That same year, Phillips became the 1st non-British correspondent to report from the Falkland Islands during the British military's conflict in Argentina. From 1984 to 1986, Phillips was promoted to correspondent and assigned to the CBS News bureau in Moscow, where he covered 3 Soviet leaders: Yuri Andropov, Konstainin Chernenko and Mikhail Gorbachev—as well as the Reagan-Gorbachev summit in Moscow and the resumption of the U.S.-Soviet arms talk. From 1986