A Town Like Alice (miniseries) Emmy Award for drama in 1981 and won a Logie Award in the "Best Single Drama or Mini Series" category at the 1982 awards with Morse, Brown and Jackson winning Logies for their performances. A Town Like Alice (miniseries) A Town Like Alice is a five-hour 1981 Australian television adaptation of Nevil Shute's novel of the same name. Produced by the Seven Network, and directed by David Stevens, it was the second major adaptation of the book. In the United States it was shown on PBS under the Masterpiece Theatre banner, a rare non-British production to be so aired. It
A Town Like Alice by the Japanese did indeed take place during World War II, but the women in question were Dutch, not British as in the novel, and the march was in Sumatra, not Malaya. Jean Paget was based on Carry Geysel (Mrs J. G. Geysel-Vonck), whom Shute met while visiting Sumatra in 1949. Geysel had been one of a group of about 80 Dutch civilians taken prisoner by Japanese forces at Padang, in the Dutch East Indies in 1942. Shute's understanding was that the women were forced to march around Sumatra for two-and-a-half years, covering , with fewer than 30 people surviving