TV: Coronation St, Beijing

The Far East, as far as the residents of Coronation Street are concerned, means the area on the other side of Audrey Roberts' hairdressing salon. But people have the same concerns and problems from Salford to Shanghai, which is why Coronation Street, 40 years old in December, is the template for Joy Luck Street, Chinese television's first soap opera.

Joy Luck Street is a joint venture between a Chinese production company, Beijing Yuhan Audio and Video, and Granada, maker of the world's most venerable soap. The project was conceived three years ago by Paul Taylor of Granada and Carolyn Reynolds, then Coronation Street's executive producer.

Several production companies in China were invited to submit storylines, although the concept of a soap was plainly alien to them ... literally so, as one proposed storyline involved space-travellers. Another featured a eunuch. "We don't think the eunuch is appropriate in this scene," Reynolds said in the most improbable e-mail she has ever sent.

At the end of 1998, eight Chinese TV executives visited the Coronation Street set. Some things bamboozled them. They could not understand why the younger male characters were not in the Army. The Rover's Return, however, they found hard to pronounce yet easy to comprehend as a focus for community life.

So Joy Luck Street premiered with a busy tea room and many of the personality types from Western soaps. Retired chef Shi Wetian is an old curmudgeon, reminiscent of Albert Tatlock or Percy Sugden. Xu Aixhu is an Audrey Roberts, an inveterate gossip. Gao Cheng, a lawyer, is shifty and scheming, like Mike Baldwin.

The Chinese also scrutinised Emmerdale. Indeed for the past year or two, according to John Whiston of Yorkshire Television, there have been "lots of Chinese men in suits wandering around Yorkshire villages" on fact-finding missions.

Whiston has been impressed by the early rushes, despite the odd dicey moment.

"I always worry when a script includes the words 'itinerant pottery-vendor,'" says Whiston, wryly. "That really puts the willies up me. And a lot of episodes did seem to end with people falling down drainage holes, which did make us wonder whether that is something that happens a lot in China."

For their part, the Chinese were concerned about some of the storylines proposed by Granada. Eugene Ferguson, a veteran director-producer who first worked on Coronation Street in 1968, suggested that one of the Joy Luck characters should have an abortion.

"'No,' they said. 'Not in a one-child family.' They didn't think it was interesting enough."

Ferguson has been travelling back and forth to Beijing overseeing development of Joy Luck Street. Traditionally, long-running dramas on Chinese television rattle quickly through the story of a particular dynasty. Ferguson has tried to temper this approach, with mixed success.

"There is one storyline in which a woman gets pregnant, has a miscarriage, has a hysterectomy and adopts a child. In the West, all that would go on for eight months. They did it in an episode-and-a-half."

The sheer scale of China encourages strong regionalism, so if Joy Luck Street was set in Beijing it would probably not appeal in Shanghai. "So Joy Luck Street is set in a fictional city," explains Gary Knight, Granada's executive commercial director. "We have information-gathering centres in five or six cities, where stories are picked up and fed into the script, so the people of Guang Zhou, for instance, can say, 'Oh yes, we know that can happen because it happened round here'."

Knight is excited by the potential of a hit show in a country with a population of 1.2 billion. He is negotiating with eight would-be sponsors.

"Advertisers are interested because it is a contemporary show," he says. "In the past, a lot of Chinese television has been devoted to celebrating former glories. So this is a really attractive proposition."

Joy Luck Street is being transmitted every Friday, Saturday and Sunday on more than 100 cable channels.

Little is being left to chance. Three official censors are permanently attached to the production team. "One of the characters was a ballsy lady who came back from a spell in England spouting Western women's lib ideas," says Ferguson. "She even had a job as a motor mechanic. But the next time I saw those scripts, she wasn't into women's lib any more and she ran a bookshop."

For the record, Coronation Street opened in Florrie Lindley's corner shop at 7 pm on Friday, December 9, 1960, and swiftly introduced Ena Sharples as an acid-tongued harridan.

The first episode of Joy Luck Street had footballing heart-throb Xu Xiaoyang returning home after a tour with the Chinese national team during which he scored China's only goal in a defeat by England. Xu Xiayong's girlfriend, Ah Lan, was pleased to see him, but not as pleased as market trader Cheng Wen, in whose heart rages a maelstrom of unrequited love.

- INDEPENDENT