The Singapore Grip

Based on real-life experiences, Tenko remains one of the most fondly remembered and acclaimed BBC dramas of the early 1980s. It follows a group of women, formerly comfortably well-off ex-pats living in Singapore, as they are captured by the Japanese during World War II.

Set in the 1930s, the drama spans across several generations of a wealthy Straits-born Chinese family in Malacca, and revolves around the feuds surrounding it. Yue Niang, a strong-willed Nyonya refuses to be consigned to her lowborn status in life and sets out to change her destiny, eventually succeeding as a businesswoman.

South Africa, 1823. The Zulu Empire, headed by King Shaka, a brilliant but ruthless military strategist, begin to encroach on the British colony of Cape Town. A volunteer cadre of explorers, mercenaries and professional soldiers are sent to Zululand to try to make contact with Shaka and assess the real threat of his army.

This drama describes the trials and tribulations the teochew Cai Family under the patriarch Cai Qingyang from the late 1940s to the 1990s.

At eight years old, an impoverished Bert Facey was forced to start the backbreaking, dawn-to-dusk life of a farm labourer. Unschooled, his father dead, abandoned by his mother, by the age of twenty he had survived the rigours of pioneering the harsh Australian bush and the slaughter of the bloody WWI campaign at Gallipoli.