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6 hours ago
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Sunday nights on BBC One should offer an escape from the disappointments of the working week. But what’s this? We’re thousands of miles away and in the distant past, but we’re uncomfortable and frustrated, mopping our troubled brows and wondering if we’ve all made a horrible mistake? That’s right: Ten Pound Poms is back for a second season.
Based on a real scheme that saw hundreds of thousands of Britons flee postwar austerity and move to Australia, paying a tenner for their passage on the understanding that a utopian existence awaited them in Oz, Ten Pound Poms concerns a gang of unfortunate Englanders who sail from Southampton to Sydney in 1956. Their plucky optimism is instantly squished when they find that, as was often the case with the real ten-pounders, the suburban idyll they’ve been promised is more like two-star glamping. Dumped in bug-infested huts built in a ring around a scrubby field, the would-be new Australians are derided and exploited at every turn, which makes their preexisting problems – teen pregnancy, addiction, loveless marriages – even more taxing.
That domestic heartbreak plays out as a never-ending series of calamities that are bleak but simply resolved, which stops Ten Pound Poms aiming for prestige drama status and makes it more of a soap. British viewers who want to draw a chuckling Prisoner: Cell Block H comparison can point to the bad-matron manager of the migrant hostels, Mrs Walker, whose contempt for her helpless wards is reminiscent of a prison officer – and who is played with some relish by Tina Bursill, once top-dog inmate Sonia Stevens in Prisoner itself.
There’s a brimming cocktail of influences. Ten Pound Poms shares the panicky “we’ve moved to Australia by mistake!” energy of Jimmy McGovern’s Banished, although there are no summary executions and nobody ever suggests resorting to cannibalism. And, for older viewers, the sight of quietly determined women trapped in substandard housing, staring down adversity through a sheen of grimy perspiration, may stir a faint memory of Tenko.
But although only Michelle Keegan’s character, Kate, is a medical practitioner, the show’s key inspiration is Call the Midwife: we’re floating back to the 1950s to watch characters deal with issues that pointedly echo the present. Most obviously, we’re on about immigration. The Britons have suffered deprivation in their country and made an arduous journey to a new home, wanting only to integrate and contribute, but they are abused by the authorities and rejected by prejudiced locals. Season one had a nicely barbed plotline about an Aussie who was hostile to the Poms, then relented and seemed like a rough diamond, but ultimately turned out not to actually care at all about newly arrived residents because his real issue was with Indigenous people. The point, about the link between opponents of immigration and racism, was not subtly made but worth making nonetheless.
Season two extends its scope beyond the iniquities of the Ten Pound scheme itself by looking at slum landlords elsewhere in the city. Terry (Warren Brown), a war veteran who seems to have overcome the PTSD that once drove him to seek refuge in alcohol, makes a renewed effort to provide for his family. He ends up falling into the employ of a property mogul who is generous in the company of his fellow “businessmen”, but treats his Greek-immigrant tenants atrociously. Will Terry’s goodness win out, or will money and status corrupt him? His less naive wife, Annie (Faye Marsay), meanwhile, may be given new opportunities at the clothing store where she controversially works, despite being a wife and mother.
Marsay and Brown offer solid performances but the A-lister here is Keegan, who effectively stars in her own separate drama. Kate, a nurse, came to Australia on the same boat as everyone else, but isn’t bothered about limited employment prospects or termites eating her hut, because back in the UK she was a struggling single mother whose baby son was shipped to Australia by a Catholic orphanage without her consent. Her emigration is a scheme to reclaim little Michael, who is now primary-school age and has been rehoused with a nice middle-class family: the season-one cliffhanger saw her coax him into her van and drive off towards an uncertain future.
Keegan thrives on those deeper emotions, and the comeback episode has a fine scene where she meets the boy’s adoptive mother (Nikki Shiels). They engage in a fraught prisoner’s dilemma negotiation, each respecting and fearing the other’s all-consuming maternal instinct, with the class divide between them adding an extra frisson.
Empathic and nuanced, the encounter shows what writer Danny Brocklehurst and his cast are capable of, but regular viewers of Ten Pound Poms know the story is likely to revert to trashy, soapy strife before long. Like the sad, sweaty Poms, we’ll just have to make do.
