Michelle Keegan acts like an Oz-bound Brit starting over

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Some of the cast have old, dramatic faces — made for a Georgian parsonage or a Victorian workhouse. Michelle Keegan is not one of them. She has the lustrous hair and flawless skin of the Love Island generation, and one of those faces where only the lower half moves.

This makes her an odd choice for Ten Pound Poms (BBC One), where she plays Kate, a young nurse who leaves 1950s Britain to make a new life in sunny Australia. But Keegan can act, and Kate’s story turns out to be poignant — she had a secret reason for joining the Ten Pound Boom scheme, under which the Australian government encouraged British workers to migrate downhill.

We also follow the Roberts family – father Terry (Warren Brown), mother Annie (Faye Marsay) and their children – who leave grimy Stockport for a fresh start in hopes of curing Terry’s drinking problem and PTSD. They’ve been sold looking like a dream detached house with a large garden, a stone’s throw from the ocean, so it’s a rude awakening when they’re bussed to a collection of nissen bungalows.

Primitive accommodation is not the only problem. Terry is not given a warm welcome at the construction site where he is sent to work. “You’ve got blacks in Britain, haven’t you? Well, here, you’re black,” growls one of his new colleagues (David Field’s Savage). Racism looms large here, directed mostly at Indigenous Australians who some consider to be little more than vermin.

Across six episodes, writer Danny Brocklehurst (Clocking Off, Brassic) confidently weaves his plots and characters together. Terry falls for a crime, which poses a terrible moral dilemma. Annie embraces the opportunities that Australia offers, namely, a job and independence. Other newcomers have their own stories, including a shady Brit so obnoxious that he told his kids when they were four that Father Christmas didn’t exist “because I didn’t like the idea that he got all the credit for my hard work.”

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