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Tenko | |
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![]() Title caption that was seen throughout the series. | |
Created by | Lavinia Warner |
Written by | Jill Hyem Anne Valery Paul Wheeler |
Directed by | Pennant Roberts David Askey David Tucker Jeremy Summers Michael Owen Morris |
Starring | Ann Bell Stephanie Cole Stephanie Beacham Louise Jameson Patricia Lawrence Veronica Roberts Emily Bolton Jeananne Crowley Elizabeth Chambers Claire Oberman Jean Anderson Burt Kwouk Rosemary Martin Elizabeth Mickery |
Theme music composer | James Harpham |
Country of origin | United Kingdom |
Original language | English |
No. of series | 3, plus 1 feature length reunion special |
No. of episodes | 31 |
Production | |
Producers | Ken Riddington Vere Lorrimer |
Running time | 50 minutes |
Original release | |
Network | BBC1 |
Release | 22 October 1981 16 December 1984 26 December 1985 | –
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Tenko is a television drama series co-produced by the BBC and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), which was broadcast between 1981 and 1985.
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 fictional Japanese internment camp on a Japanese-occupied island in the Dutch East Indies in modern day Indonesia between Singapore and Australia (the actual location of the island is not revealed in the series but it is assumed that the fictitious locations are set in south east Sumatra). Having been separated from their husbands, herded into makeshift holding camps and largely forgotten by the British War Office, the women had to learn to cope with appalling living conditions, malnutrition, disease, sexual violence and death.