Ten Pound Poms series two review – this trashy, soapy migration drama is a knockoff Call the Midwife
Michelle Keegan is the only nurse in this 50s-set drama about Brits emigrating to Australia, but its slight take on social issues that are relevant today recalls the BBC birthing drama
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.
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