During his 35-year career, TV producer Dai Richards has filmed on death row, met with triads and interviewed Mafia hitmen.

And although he’s worked on flagship programmes such as Newsnight, Panorama and Timewatch, it was a lucky break that took him into journalism.

After law school, he qualified as a barrister and began to specialise in town planning, but was not entirely happy.

He explained: “Being in chambers back then was too much like being at boarding school.

“It was elitist, hierarchical and pretty pompous at that time.”

He decided he wanted to be a TV journalist and his break came aged 25, when he was asked to work on a Thames TV project about London’s future development.

Although there was no television involved, it gave him a foot in the door.

He soon landed a job as a researcher on the current affairs series, Thames Reports, from where he went on to research on Crime Inc, a major documentary series about the Mafia.

During filming, he and the crew were taken to an aeroplane hangar for a rendezvous with an ex-mobster-turned-witness, surrounded by FBI agents carrying guns.

In 1988 he was approached by Newsnight, where he made films on subjects including the shooting of three IRA members in Gibraltar.

His ambition to work on Panorama came true when the then-editor, Mark Thompson – who later became director general of the BBC – recruited him as a producer.

During this time, he filmed on location in China, two years after the Tiananmen Square massacre. He and his crew posed as tourists, using new passports.

While there, they had contact with Triad members, who had used their smuggling routes and safe houses to help escapees from Tiananmen.

For another Panorama film, he spent several weeks interviewing US prisoners on death row in Texas, Louisiana, Alabama and Virginia.

Mr Richards, 62, who lives in Summertown, Oxford, left the BBC to go freelance in 1996.

Since then, he has worked on a huge variety of films, including a six-part series about the history of the Israeli-Arabic conflict, another on Iran’s relations with the West and more recently, the Chilean miners trapped underground for 10 weeks in 2011.

He also teaches TV production at Bournemouth University and the Metropolitan Film School.

He said: “I get paid to explore fascinating topics and stories and go to remarkable places.

“I have met a whole range of people I find remarkable and most of all, ordinary people who have been through extraordinary experiences and retain their humanity. I don’t get paid as much as a lawyer but have a more interesting and fulfilling time than I think I would have, had I stayed at the Bar.”