As part of her investigations, she wanted to examine someone who was able to kill (other than in self-defence) without any signs of mental imbalance or physical damage. So when she heard about a state executioner who had thrown the switch on 19 death- row inmates – and who was willing to be interviewed – she felt that she had to meet him. IT WAS nightfall by the time we found the trailer park that Bob Smith called home. Because his own trailer was too small to accommodate all of us and our equipment (I had asked to bring along both the film-maker George Baillard to document the interview, and my close friend Cathi Yeager), he had arranged to borrow the larger trailer of a friend for the interview None the less, it was a tight squeeze. As I recall, by the time the two tripods and cameras were set up – Cathi had also brought along a video for backup – there was little room for George, who had either to stand or half-sit on a bookshelf.

There was a nice scene in which Peggy’s date upbraids her for being too Chinese when she insists on settling a restaurant bill, and a running joke about Peggy’s aunt’s taste for bowling and English puddings, but it didn’t run much deeper than that. Weightlessness is a key ingredient of romantic comedy, but not the sort that blithely lifts the characters out of their surroundings.Peggy’s brother Jack was married to an Englishwoman, and it seemed odd in a drama about a Chinese father’s patriarchal stance on arranged marriage that his son’s troubled marriage was presented as the perfectly normal union of a workaholic male and a sexually frustrated female. But you had to look pretty hard to find any of the above in Kevin Wong, whose first script for television this was, is not a born and bred Scouser, and may as well have set it in Ullapool, or Hartlepool, or plain Poole. His ear was much less attuned to Liverpudlian speech rhythms than to homespun oriental philosophy, which he had fun sending up “They say first love never dies,” said Peggy’s aunt “Why?” asked Peggy. “They just do.”There could also have been a bit more on how the Chinese characters bedded down in their adoptive home. On the banks of the Mersey, the wellspring of the unlucky Jordaches and the turbulent Grants, of jobless Yosser Hughes, Jimmy McGovern’s Hillsborough mourners and Willy Russell’s self-improving housewives, the dialogue is scabrous, the moral landscape complex, the social realism stark and the drama never less than involving.

The script was itself a kind of arranged marriage between ancient and modern, an experiment in dramatic miscegenation in which a portrait of Chinese nuptial mores was spliced to a gaudy snapshot of a British city on the cusp of global notoriety.There wasn’t much room for doubt about which party had been forced into it. Liverpool is a good place for any drama to pitch camp, bringing with it a fingerprint you recognise a mile off. A mid-August premiere for a feature-length drama thus comes with a critical pre-judgement slung round its neck. “This one’s a goner,” it reads: “didn’t quite have the legs for the autumn schedule”. , a romantic comedy set among the Chinese community in pre-Beatles Liverpool, was heavily trailed, and made with the aid of lottery funding, but the date of transmission warned you to lower expectations, and oddly that helped you to savour its rather messy charms.The plot chronicled a Chinese immigrant teenager’s quest to choose her own husband rather than accept the hand of Gilbert, the predictably hapless alternative her father brings over from Hong Kong. Peggy Su!

BBC2
August is the cruellest month for television drama. The industry’s assumption, perhaps derived from its own annual removal to the Edinburgh Television Festival, is that no one else is watching either.