So, there I was, minding my own business on the ditie, when a shouty fellow came by vending newspapers. The front page proclaimed that Andy Lau had been shot and killed the previous day. At first, I found this so unbelievable that I assumed it must just be a faux-news cover for more prurient content to be found within the flimsy, blue-hued paper. But then I remembered that Chinese people are, to a man, purer than the driven snow and would never stoop to such crafty lows. I resigned myself to the death of China's most beloved 'artist'.

But then a strange thing happened. The next day, there was another news story saying that Andy Lau had been shot and killed the night before. How was this possible? Then the same thing happened the day after that, and the day after that and so on and so forth. Clearly, Andy Lau is trapped in a bizarre Groundhog Day-style cycle in which he is shot and killed every night, only to awake unharmed in his bed the next morning. What a tragic, senseless repeated waste of the same human life. I became determined to see if there was any way to help him. I got on the first plane I could down to Hong Kong.

There I got in touch with Andy's manager and asked him what the deal was. "What's the deal?" I said, sitting down for a drink and a chat with manager Gordon Lap in a hotel lobby. "Andy gets shot and killed by a masked gunman every day at a varying point between 10pm and midnight. Then, he wakes up in his own bed the next morning at precisely 5:38am. We were all shocked and saddened by Andy's death the first few times it happened, but now we've sort of got used to it." But does it affect the megastar's work, I wondered? "It can be inconvenient if he's in a film that needs to do shooting at night, but otherwise it's not too bad. You can ask him yourself about it, though. I'll just give him a ring - he's upstairs... Andy? Andy? Oh. Sorry, he's been shot."

Unfortunately, I never did get to meet Andy, as I had to fly home the next morning. Nonetheless, we can all take heart in the knowledge that, even if you shoot him fatally every night, you can't keep a true artist down. Or Andy Lau.