Women's Rights & Issues

That BBC series looks like something worth aiming the co-vivant at to do his downloading magic.

The woman on stage in the clip is Ann Bell who was also one of the leads in one of my all-time favourite BBC series, Tenko. I mentioned it briefly in a thread last month. Allow me to go on a little about it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenko_%28TV_series%29

Obviously if you want to watch the series you do not - not! - want to read the episode synopses etc.! So I'll just copy the important bits:

Tenko is a television drama, co-produced by the BBC and the ABC. A total of thirty episodes were produced between 1981 and 1984 for women, followed by a one-off special (which was twice the length of the other episodes), Tenko Reunion, in 1985 - also for women in mind.
(That looks to need some wiki editing -- a series for women; you'd think it was the 1950s ...)

The series dealt with the experiences of British, Australian and Dutch women who were captured after the fall of Singapore in February 1942, after the Japanese invasion, and held in a Japanese internment camp on a Japanese-occupied island between Singapore and Australia. Tenko dramatises the experiences of European women interned by the Japanese militia following the invasion of Singapore in 1942. Having been separated from their husbands, herded into makeshift holding camps and largely forgotten by the British War Office, the women have to learn to cope with appalling living conditions, malnutrition, disease, violence and death.

Tenko was created by Lavinia Warner after she had conducted research into the internment of nursing corps officer Margot Turner (1910–1993) for an edition of This Is Your Life and was convinced of the dramatic potential of the stories of women prisoners of the Japanese.

... The series was praised for its bold storytelling, and outstanding performances from its leads.

Its creator, Lavinia Warner, initially found it difficult to get Tenko commissioned, as this was the 1970s when mostly men ran the organization and no other programme existed which featured simply women. However, the then Director General of the BBC did commission Tenko, and some say that if not for Tenko, programmes such as Footballers' Wives and Bad Girls would not exist.

Despite its comparatively modest production values, it has been favourably compared to big-budget versions of what is essentially the same story, such as the Bruce Beresford film Paradise Road.

We did download the first season a while back (I've watched it 3 times through over the years, on various US and Cdn public TV networks, but the co-vivant had never seen it), but the sound on the copy he got was so atrocious we couldn't watch it. I'll have to get him to look for it again. If you don't have a downloading wizard in the vicinity, it's available to buy on DVD, of course, expensively, but since it did show on PBS, I wonder whether libraries in the US might have it.

It is terrific. The cast is all women, except for the Japanese camp commander, whose character is developed extremely well, and the bit players - camp guards, and husbands and boyfriends in the first episodes of the series. The women are British, Australian and Dutch, and include a tough doctor (Stephanie Cole best known for the series Waiting for God), a nun, nurses, military wives, wealthy planters' wives, and so on. The dynamics of their relationships with one another, their personal stories, and the gritty horrors of life in the camp, are all fascinating and tremendously well handled. I can't recommend it highly enough.

The creator, Lavinia Warner, also wrote the book on which Bruce Beresford's movie Paradise Road (which I haven't seen but now I think I will) was based.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavinia_Warner
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradise_Road_%281997_film%29

It seems to have the same basic cast of characters, although fewer. If you have a choice, you want to see Tenko first. It has three seasons (which are called "series" in the UK) and a reunion TV movie.

There was a 1950 movie with the same theme: Three Came Home, with Claudette Colbert.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Came_Home
(links for free downloading as it is now public domain)


While I'm veering off topic (but not so very far!) -- I was just recommending Oh What A Lovely War to a colleague of mine -- Vanessa Redgrave does a cameo turn as Sylvia Pankhurst which is what brought it to mind here.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oh!_What_a_Lovely_War

Great flick if you're wanting some excellent black humour and stylized truth about WWI with lots of big stars doing their bit.