A turning point in world history

He is best known in China for the critically acclaimed six-part The Story Of China-a look at China's history from 2,000 BC to today-which was aired on the BBC in 2016, and then on PBS.

"It was very well received in China and we have had a lot of approaches by Chinese companies to do things after that. In fact, we are doing a coproduction with CCTV and the BBC about China's greatest poet, Du Fu," he says.

Wood believes, however, it is important to get across the significance of China's reform and opening-up to a bigger audience, particularly a Western one. And he cites as an example a new BBC series called Icons about the most important figures of the 20th century, where former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping does not even feature, despite the 40th anniversary of his great initiative having just passed.

"He is not mentioned. Yet the opening-up of China is one of the most important moments in the modern history of the world and Deng the most important leader of the 20th century," he says.

The new series wrestles with some of the historical complexity of reform and opening-up. The actual anniversary is linked to the Third Plenary Session of the 11th CPC Central Committee, which was held between Dec 18 and 22, 1978, at the Jingxi Hotel in Beijing's Haidian district. Deng's defining speech was at the work conference held at the same hotel earlier.

"The plenum is generally regarded as 'the thing' but the speech earlier is one of the things I wanted to untangle," he says.

Xiaogang village in Anhui province, where a group of farmers broke with the commune system, in December 1978, and divided land among themselves, also features in the film.

The event is seen as the launchpad of agricultural reform, the basis of China's economic advancement.

"Four-fifths of the Chinese population still worked on the land in 1978 so this was a massive moment symbolically," Wood says.