Ten Pound Poms fills the gap left by Call the Midwife ...Middle East

When the first series of Danny Brocklehurst’s drama Ten Pound Poms began in 2023, it offered up familiar vibes – a comforting, slightly soapy Sunday night drama – but with a sliver of not especially well known recent history.

In the middle of the 20th century, the Assisted Passage Migration Scheme saw Brits lured by glossy newspaper adverts to emigrate to Australia for the princely sum of £10. But – as depicted in the series – the promise of a new life of sun, sea and sand did not live up to expectations. New arrivals were met with dismal housing, poorly paid jobs, xenophobia and a whole lot of general unfairness. Thank goodness nothing like that happens these days, eh?

For series two, it is 1957 and our blow-ins are once again the Roberts family – Terry (Warren Brown), Annie (Faye Marsay) and their children Pattie and Peter. After a year of living the disappointing Down Under dream, they are still in a grotty hostel and things are even more cramped now teenage Pattie has had her baby daughter.

With a long waiting list for rehousing, Terry is on the hunt for better work and when he’s dispatched to fix dry rot in overcrowded tenement housing, he discovers that maybe they don’t have it so bad after all. While his gut instinct is that the vulnerable residents are being exploited, he is quickly distracted by meeting Benny, the suave landlord who befriends him and offers him a new job that seems too good to be true.

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There’s more than a hint that all of this might eventually lead Terry astray, whether it’s the sad but beautiful single mother who keeps catching his eye or the fact that Benny is certainly, definitely a wrong’un. There was some criticism of the first series that it portrayed the Brits as beacons of integrity, so a storyline where Terry’s moral compass might be knocked off kilter by his own self-interest is a welcome change.

Away from the Roberts, we also pick up with Michelle Keegan’s nurse, Kate. Having sailed halfway across the world to track down her son Michael in the Australian care system after he was taken from her while she was suffering from postnatal depression, she has now abducted him from his adoptive parents and is on the run.

After her attempt to flee to New Zealand with him is thwarted, a breezy campervan trip playing happy families cannot last: Michael misses his adoptive mother, who he calls “Real Mummy”. This storyline is an example of Ten Pound Poms veering into darker territory than you might expect, and Keegan is reliably good as she wrestles with doing the right thing for Michael without losing him entirely.

Despite a fairly cautious pace, there are plenty of other storylines flying around. In a series of tender scenes, hostel boss JJ (Stephen Curry) is sneaking into a mental institution to visit his married lover Sheila (Emma Hamilton) after her suicide attempt. Meanwhile, there’s a new addition, cocky Irish gardener Ray Skinner, who looks set to be a troublemaker, and Annie’s boss Marlene is going to increasingly extreme measures to avoid her ex-husband.

It’s a charming series that fits into Call the Midwife‘s Sunday evening slot perfectly: a well-executed, earnest period piece with committed performances and likeable characters. At the same time, the demands of broadcasting on a Sunday evening – to challenge viewers only gently, balance any darkness with jollity and embrace a dose of melodrama and schmaltz – means that the serious issues Ten Pound Poms touches on are couched in a cosiness that does not always serve them best.

‘Ten Pound Poms’ continues next Sunday at 9pm on BBC One

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