In the 1970s, the Hong Kong film industry, especially Cantonese film production, was largely stagnant due to the cheap production and the oversupply of films in genres such as comedy and opera throughout the 1950s and 1960s. The production of Hong Kong films was also hindered by import taxes and quota systems affecting films that were introduced in the 1970s in many Southeast Asian countries, such as Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore, which used to be major overseas markets for Hong Kong films. By contrast, Hong Kong's local TV industry experienced rapid growth. As Zhong Baoxian (2004: 240) observed, while the Hong Kong TV industry provided an alternative site for established filmmakers to continue to work when the Cantonese cinema experienced a downturn in the 1960s and early 1970s, it also cultivated many new talents who later became the key workforce of the Hong Kong cinema in the 1980s. To a great extent, the 1970s’ Hong Kong TV industry can be seen as an indispensable linkage connecting the Hong Kong cinema of the 1960s and the 1980s, not only because the operational correlation between Hong Kong's TV and film studios in this period was too close to be ignored, but also because local stars and creative talents frequently traversed the two industries. Thus, it is important to look at these stars’ TV images if we are to develop an adequate understating of Hong Kong film stardom.

In the 1970s, Hong Kong TV studios adopted a similar star system to 1960s’ film studios. Backed by strong financial input and a vast pool of viewers, TVB was known as the ‘cradle of stars’ and as a ‘dream factory of stars’ (Zhong 2004: 318; Pang and Zheng 2005). Following the example of the Shaw Brothers, Hong Kong's biggest film studio in the 1960s and 1970s, TVB also tried to control its stars and their images. As one of these studio-trained actors, Chow spent nearly fourteen years at TVB before moving exclusively to the film industry. During this period, Chow acted in nearly a thousand episodes of TV dramas, which earned him the reputation of the ‘king of TVB drama’ by the start of the 1980s (Pang and Zheng 2005).