In the TV collection Ten Pound Poms a ten pound pom prefers demise to Australia.
This is shades of the character in Oscar Wilde’s Importance Of Being Earnest who, when confronted with immigration, declares “Australia! I’d sooner die”.
Ten Pound Poms is a BBC cleaning soap opera made by and for British folks, and its loathing and resentment of Australia is appalling, unrelenting and extraordinary. It’s a clumsy, surprising and extremely offensive TV present.
After WWII, a million British folks emigrated to Australia on Australian Government assisted packages for ten kilos every. Together with huge European immigration to Australia the poms had been a part of the largest migration scheme in historical past.
The British individuals who got here right here left the privations of war-ravaged, dank Britain for the sunshine of alternative in our nation.
The overwhelming majority cherished Australia and had been and are grateful for his or her new lives right here simply as Australians are grateful to them for what they’ve added to our tradition and society together with two PMs, the Bee Gees, the Easybeats, John Paul Young, John Farnham, Jimmy Barnes and Kylie Minogue.
However within the collection Ten Pound Poms many of the poms detest Australia and are tortured by Australians.
Set in 1956, the depressing household of an alcoholic bricklayer with PTSD from the battle involves Australia and is much more depressing.
Apparently there was no racism in Britain within the 50s. The Nissen Hut migration hostel is dilapidated and inexplicably privately owned and there are cockroaches within the meals. Quickly, the daddy turns into unwittingly implicated within the violent demise of an Aboriginal baby.
His daughter is immediately impregnated by an Aboriginal youth.
The Aboriginal folks within the collection are depicted as evil, a college instructor is brutal and evil, the proprietor of the hostel is evil and the police are evil, silly and corrupt. Welcome to Australia.
Almost each Australian within the collection is a racist bigot and one of many only a few good Australians is, extremely, a bohemian proprietor of a store in a small nation city who owns a seaside mansion replete with twenty first century decor and swimming pool.
The British forged members taking part in Mancunians appear to lack the requisite mushy pea accent and the present has offered work for Australian actors and crew, all of whom ought to be ashamed of the present.
David Field performs an aggressive racist ditch digger and provides the hammiest efficiency I’ve seen in many years.
It’s disgusting that he’s meant to symbolize Australian folks to a British viewers.
The present couldn’t be worse.
Of course there are ugly Australians and naturally they need to be depicted as they’re beautifully within the best Australian movie ever made, Wake In Fright, which was, fortunately, a British manufacturing and the ugliness was balanced with sardonic humour and fact.
Ten Pound Poms is an historic drama but it’s chockers with howling inaccuracies.
In the present we see a recreation of the primary moments of TV in Australia as an actor taking part in an unacknowledged Bruce Gyngell introduces entertainers Toni Lamond and Frank Sheldon who had been really not there that night time.
International cellphone calls weren’t immediately made in 1956, there have been no cane toads in Sydney, folks at posh events didn’t swill beer from the bottle and beer bottles had been solely lengthy necks then.
The complete present appears to occur over one summer time during which there are not any flies, no British individual ever complains in regards to the warmth and a woman is impregnated and carries the kid for 9 months and provides beginning seemingly within the area of the identical summer time.
The present is offensive, it hates Australia and Australians and fails to understand the house and alternatives we gave to the ten pound poms who wished to return right here. It depicts Australia as stuffed with silly, evil racists and the present can also be offensive to many British immigrants.
It’s a really unhealthy present. It’s as phoney as a 3 pound word and, shockingly, it’s vastly in style in Britain amongst folks comfortable to hate multicultural Australia and comfortable to imagine that demise was preferable to residing in Australia. Ten Pound Poms really provides us all one thing to complain about. How unhappy and unhealthy.
Originally revealed as Ten Pound Poms: Sad, unhealthy TV drama appears to hate Australia | Peter Goers
Source: www.dailytelegraph.com.au
