Ten Pound Poms season 2 review: British migrants sold false dream
Countless war-weary Britons bought into clever advertising showing golden beaches and beautiful houses. In reality, many immigrants arrived Down Under to gross disappointment.
‘I have not written a period drama before, for good reason, because they’re generally quite tricky to make good,” writer Danny Brocklehurst says of why he was attracted to the idea of creating the highly successful Ten Pound Poms. “But I was drawn to the themes of escape, of no matter where we go, we take our problems with us – something which is ever present in my work – and the fact that this was a piece of our history that I didn’t know much about.”
The series, the highest-rating new BBC drama of 2023, which is about to return on Stan, dramatises the way so many white Brits were only too delighted to escape post-war austerity, the unemployment, rationing and the housing shortage at home. They were going to work in the dark and coming home in the dark, in cities where it was always raining, or seemed to be.
Many were sick, too, of England’s deeply entrenched inequalities between classes – like some of Brocklehurst’s characters, and even when the economy started to boom, the stratification remained.
Prime Minister Winston Churchill had encouraged Britons to stay and rebuild their shattered country, but Australia’s Assisted Passage Migration Scheme (also known as the Ten-Pound Pom policy) proved extremely popular with war-weary British citizens. By 1947, more than 400,000 of them had registered.
As the show dramatises, the idea of Australia – those lovely light-filled houses and family times on pretty, white beaches – exerted a powerful, innately resonating force for the suffering British.
It’s easy to understand how, like Brocklehurst’s central characters, they were enticed by the clever advertising that seemed to appear all over Britain, and which is beautifully displayed in a montage constructed around the series titles.
The advertising was persuasive and aggressive, colourfully using emotive language and motifs. The use of the Southern Cross and its stars was common – behold Australia’s clear nights and open country, a seductive image of adventure and a better life. (One famous poster featured five slogans: Men for the land; women for the home; employment guaranteed; good wages; plenty of opportunity.”)
Brocklehurst’s drama is built around this disparity between what the Australian government promised UK migrants and the antipodean reality.
“The technicolour promo films of the time showed golden beaches, beautiful houses with picket fences and big gardens, attractive, suntanned people waterskiing and playing volleyball,” Brocklehurst writes on the BBC’s website.
“But in reality, many immigrants arrived to gross disappointment. They were housed in post-war steel Nissen huts with outdoor showers, no flush toilets and terrible food. The accommodation was cramped, insects rife, the heat stifling and walls paper-thin.”
And the people who were supposed to welcome them, didn’t really want them.
This of course is what happens to the Roberts family, whose further antipodean adventures we catch up with as the new season, led by Faye Marsay’s long-suffering Annie and Warren Brown’s truculent Terry, the former soldier for whom things start to look up as the story continues.
The other central narrative concerns Michelle Keegan’s somewhat mysterious Kate, who we find now on the run in the new season, having kidnapped her son, Michael, from his adoptive parents, the boy played with stoic patience by Alastair Bradman.
What Brocklehurst has given in this entertaining series is a kind of social melodrama, while his story is somewhat of a moral fantasy. And no less enjoyable for that; it’s actually relaxing to watch something elegant and thoughtful in which there are no serial killers, no shootouts or paranoid, dystopian depictions of politics.
As Brocklehurst says, Ten Pound Poms is unashamedly a character drama, a rarity in “a TV landscape awash with cops and crime and high concept whiz-bang.”
His plotting is complicated and diffuse and the notion of a kind of poetic justice hangs over it in the presentation of the trials and tribulations that the good are subjected to by the wicked – especially in the case of the migrant families – Australian government.
As Terry says at one point on a visit to the Department of Immigration, “in England, they showed us great big houses and great big gardens; they told us all this would be ours. It was all a pack of lies”.
Brocklehurst interweaves the patterns of melodrama with the events surrounding British immigration, anatomising the hidden motives, secret corruption and human folly underlying the politics. The good folk undergo such testing and difficulty but, one hopes, are ultimately saved, or at least move into one of those new bungalows that so fascinate Terry.
The first episode of the new season takes us into 1957, the Roberts family still determined against all odds to achieve their slice of the Australian dream. Stylishly directed by Ana Kokkinos, the story picks up quickly after the first, initially following Kate’s narrative. She’s now desperately trying to escape to New Zealand with the understandably confused Michael. The boy is still unable to process the revelation that the glamorous Kate is his true mother.
At Melbourne’s busy, clamorous port, she steals a woman’s handbag containing a B-Class ticket to that country but is thwarted by immigration officials.
Back at the Galgownie migrant hostel, Stephen Curry’s JJ Walker is still running things in his brightly authoritarian way, management tightening even further and making life more difficult for the families. (As Terry, who had been imprisoned during the war, said on first seeing Galgownie, “It’s like a prisoner of war camp.”)
Pattie Roberts (Hattie Hook), Terry and Annie’s daughter, has her baby now, though its incessant crying is creating problems in the cramped confines of the huts. Terry appears before the Department of Immigration in the attempt to find larger quarters but is impassively told it will be at least 14 months “before something suitable” becomes available. (Australian officials are seen as obdurate and unsympathetic, largely unwilling to cut the Poms a break.)
Then Kate becomes aware through a newspaper article that she is wanted by authorities for abducting Michel.
And Terry, appearing before the intransigent officials at the Employment Board flukes a new job fixing dry rot in some decrepit migrant slum housing where he meets entrepreneurial landlord Benny Bates (Marcus Graham). The spivvy Benny, after Terry rescues him from a violent, harassed tenant, offers him a more lucrative job as a kind of roustabout and minder. Things are looking up but the situation with Kate and Michael still must be rationalised, a task that falls on Annie, a born negotiator.
There are a lot of storylines adroitly handled by Kokkinos and her director of photography, the experienced Martin McGrath, whose credits include not only Muriel’s Wedding but hit TV shows like Rake and Jack Irish. The production maintains the style of the previous season, episodes of which Kokkinos also directed, the action largely packed attractively inside kind of montage sequences top and tailed by thumping songs from the period.
Ten Pound Poms entertainingly gives insight into the inner workings and motives of a piece of historical legislation of which few of us have much understanding, entertainingly taking us below the surface to the inside story. The social criticism is neatly contained, the story again fast-paced, crisscrossing smoothly from narrative to narrative, but it remains unclear whether it will all lead to a morally satisfactory ending.
Certainly, the ending of the first new episode suggests that the sense of injustice and disorder felt by these Ten Pound Poms may not be alleviated any time soon.
Ten Pound Poms, coming March 10 on Stan
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