Ten Pound Poms, BBC 1 Sundays and iPlayer
It’s not often we see white English people subject to discrimination, but we get it in Ten Pound Poms, the new BBC Sunday evening offer.
Terry (Warren Brown) has moved to Australia with his family to escape the drudgery of 1940s and 50s Britain and he gets it directly.
The English are “whingeing poms” and Terry is not allowed in the Australian-only toilet block on the site he’s gotten a job at.
“This is an Aussie dunny for Aussie p**s and Aussie s**t, got it?” says sadistic Dean (David Field).
“You got blacks in Britain, ain’t you. Well, over here you’re the black. Now, go p**s in the bushes.”
Ten Pounds Poms tells the story of around one million Brits who emigrated under an Australian government scheme where their six-week passage was subsidised to just £10.
They had to give up their passport for two years, but were given full rights and offered a new life down under.
Terry is encouraged to take the boat by his wife. She’s fed up with his drinking and gambling since he came back from the war.
Terry’s got PTSD after fighting in the disastrous British push at Arnhem in the Netherlands in 1944.
It’s no wonder the family took up the offer to leave Stockport. I’ve no doubt the north of England was no bed of roses in the late 1940s but it looked post-apocalyptic in Ten Pounds Poms. Snow followed rain and it was so dark I could hardly make out the action.
Suddenly we had brightness when they got out of the boat, but things weren’t great at their first stop, somewhere outside Sydney.
They were housed in government-supplied Nissan Huts in what Terry described as a “prisoner of war camp”.
They soon found out they weren’t the only people discriminated against.
When wife Annie (Faye Marsay) goes to the local shop, she’s shocked when an aboriginal woman is ordered to the back of the queue.
Annie is so shocked she asks to speak to the manager, but would a 1940s English housewife really have been that surprised?
Still, the characters are building well, and we have deep sympathy for Terry.
He loves his wife and children, did his bit in the war, sticks up for the native population and is willing to take any job (digging ditches) to get his family out of the camp.
Unfortunately, things take a turn for the worse when he makes peace with Dean and agrees to go to the pub with the lads from the site.
Dean, a racist and bully, inveigles Terry to go for a night-time drunken drive in the outback.
Dean tries to scare him by switching off the headlights and then knocks down an aboriginal boy at a crossroads.
His father appears clutching his boy’s body. Terry tries to ask how the boy is but Dean insists they make a run for it and his PTSD starts to kick in again.
Things move along quickly in Ten Pound Poms with lots happening.
Kate (Michelle Keegan) is a nurse who became friendly with the family on the trip over.
We learn in the first couple of episodes that she’s come to Australia to try to find her son who had been taken from her in Britain when she had a baby outside marriage.
Meanwhile, Bill (Leon Ford), an accountant, is determined to become rich in this new land. So determined, that he cooks up a scheme with another camp resident to stage a robbery as Bill makes a bank deposit for his firm.
His scheming seems pointless as he’s unaware that his wife is having an affair with the camp supervisor JJ.
Ten Pounds Poms isn’t going to win any awards but it will keep you busy on a Sunday night.
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