Plot

Nicole Kidman and Denholm Elliott star in a 1989 miniseries about a young woman in a Thai prison for carrying her boyfriend's heroin.

The story of Kat Stanton, an Australian woman searching for her father who, whilst travelling back from London to Australia via Thailand, makes friends with Arkie Ragan, a photographer. Kat is tricked into carrying some luggage through Thai customs for Arkie, only for the police to find drugs in his bag. Kat is sentenced to spend time in the horrific "Bangkok Hilton" prison, where she makes friends with fellow inmate Mandy Engels, who has been sentenced to death. Whilst she endures the terrible conditions inside, Kat's lawyer Richard Carlisle and ex-patriot Hal Stanton battle with the authorities to have her freed.—Jonathan Broxton <j.w.broxton@sheffield.ac.uk>

A young woman goes in search of the father she has never known. Her search takes her from Australia to England and then on to Bangkok. There she meets up with a charming young man, Arkie Regan, who plants drugs in her luggage and leaves her to her fate when the authorities find them during a routine search at the airport. Following her imprisonment in the notorious Bangkok Hilton prison she awaits the decision of the authorities on whether she should face the death penalty.

Bangkok Hilton begins as Hal Stanton (Denholm Elliott) leaves Bangkok by ship in the present day. He explains that he has been travelling for years, since a shameful incident when he was a prisoner of the Japanese right there in Bangkok in WWII.

He then takes us to 1960s Sydney, where he was working as a lawyer under the assumed name of Graham Greene. He falls in love with Katherine Faulkner (Judy Morris), the lovely but sheltered daughter of a wealthy family who live in a huge, isolated mansion in the outback. He visits the estate and woos Katherine and they fall passionately in love, but Hal's secret identity is soon exposed. During the war he betrayed a group of his own men, who were planning an escape, to their Japanese captors, and was later court-martialled for it. The fact that he did so to protect the rest of his men from reprisals was considered irrelevant, and he has lived with the shame ever since. Katherine's family break up the relationship and Hal moves, despondently, away. Katherine is pregnant, however, and soon gives birth to an asthmatic girl, Katrina. The young girl is raised on her own at the estate, treated as a shameful product of the illicit affair. A few years later, Katrina, now grown (Nicole Kidman), loses her mother to cancer and inherits the family fortune. Having never ventured off the estate, she travels to Sydney, where she learns that her father is not dead, as she was always told. She decides to go to London, where his family lived, to track him down.

In London, she makes contact with the uncle and cousin she has never met before, overcoming their initial reluctance to meet with her. While planning her return to Australia, Katrina is befriended by Arkie Ragan (Jerome Ehlers), a young American photojournalist who becomes her lover and travelling companion. When the trail leads Katrina to Bangkok, Arkie suggests they go by way of Goa. While enjoying a romantic weekend there, he secretly picks up a shipment of heroin and loads it into a hidden compartment in the carrying case of a camera he has given to Katrina. Katrina and Arkie attempt to find Hal in Bangkok, but find the family lawyer, Richard Carlisle (Hugo Weaving), unwilling to help. Reluctantly returning to Australia, Katrina is arrested at the airport when drug sniffing dogs detect the drugs in her camera case, after which she is intimately searched. Arkie, who had joined another queue in the customs hall, disappears.

Katrina, after being given an unfair trial in which she has to face the judge barefoot in a brown prison smock, is imprisoned in a squalid, overcrowded Bangkok prison nicknamed the "Bangkok Hilton". There she meets another Australian woman, Mandy Engels (Joy Smithers), a heroin addict also imprisoned for drug trafficking. Mandy had used her brother, Billy (Noah Taylor), who has a profound intellectual disability, to carry her drugs as they passed through airport customs but the drugs were detected and both were sentenced to death for trafficking. As Katrina's case works its way through the courts they become friends, with Mandy teaching Katrina the ropes of prison life. Meanwhile, Richard Carlisle convinces Hal to take an active part in the case, pretending to be a lawyer from Carlisle's firm.

Hal finds it especially difficult to visit Katrina in the "Bangkok Hilton," because it is the same prison where he was kept by the Japanese forty years earlier. Nonetheless, he finds the will to do so, and to retrace Katrina's footsteps to London and Goa, reuniting with his family as he tracks down the elusive Arkie, hoping his daughter can be saved this way. Eventually, though, Hal and Katrina will be forced to rely only on their own strength to save her life.