UK actress complains about cold while filming Ten Pound Poms

British actor Michelle Keegan feels the cold. Which is problematic given she hails from northern England, a place not exactly known for its bright blue skies and sunny days.

It’s not surprising, then, that when the 35-year-old award-winning actor, known for her work in Coronation Street, Our Girl and the critically acclaimed Brassic, was approached to star in the Stan original drama Ten Pound Poms, she jumped at the chance.

A few months on an Aussie film set, shooting in the sun? Sign her up!

“But it was bad! I couldn’t believe it,” says Keegan, who is chatting to STM from London, where she’s filming a new Netflix drama. It’s a disappointingly grey day outside, and we’re talking about the weather.

Keegan has a bone to pick.

“I arrived (in Australia) a year ago today, and I was there for four months, and before I left I’d packed vests (singlets), dresses and all my summer wardrobe . . . Then, when I arrived, I was like, ‘Oh my god, I’m going to have to get a (raincoat) and something warmer!

“I couldn’t believe it.”

She’d been lured here under false pretences — much like the characters front and centre in Stan’s new six-part drama, a co-production with the BBC.

Based on true events in Australian history, the series follows a group of Brits who decide to take part in the so-called Ten Pound Pom initiative, leaving dreary postwar Britain for a fresh start in Australia.

Their stories are based on the real accounts of those who took part in the Australian Government’s Assisted Passage Migration Scheme, which lured more than a million migrants from the British Isles between 1945 and 1972.

These new arrivals were offered the voyage to Australia on ships and aircraft on the proviso that they work: Australia needed workers, Britain’s economy was in dire straits — it felt like a win-win.

These Ten Pound Poms, named for the £10 processing fee they incurred, were sold a dream: promised homes of their own, large gardens, a proliferation of jobs and educational opportunities for their kids — and all under the vast blue sky of an idyllic Australia.

But the reality was something else entirely.

“It was all about showing you this dream,” Keegan says of the initiative, which she took a deep dive into when researching before signing on to begin filming.

“Postwar Britain, at that time, was a very hard place to live. There weren’t a lot of job prospects, and there wasn’t a lot of happiness, shall we say. So for them to be sold this, ‘Come to the other side of the world, and to this brand-new sunny life’ dream, it made sense.

“Of course, when they got there, it wasn’t as idyllic as what they thought it was going to be — it was a struggle.

“Their passports were taken off them for two years, they had to go and find their own jobs, they couldn’t leave if they wanted to leave.”

In short, life was tough.

And it’s this reality, that saw most end up living in makeshift hostels, eking out a living with menial work as they fought to re-establish themselves and their families in a foreign land, that’s explored in the show. It’s a story plenty of West Australians will surely find familiar.

British screenwriter Danny Brocklehurst spent a significant amount of time in the years leading up to filming diving into the history of the scheme, watching documentaries, reading books, and talking with the production’s full-time researcher, who produced a detailed 50-page document.

“It opened up a whole river of imagination and knowledge which I found fascinating,” he says.

“The research offered up so many ideas that it was almost overwhelming; there were so many fascinating and heartbreaking potential stories, so many directions I could go in.

“I had to choose who was going to come over to Australia, who was already there, what year do we begin — there were lots of important decisions to make early on.”

He decided on 1956, in case you’re wondering, and also decided almost immediately to cast his long-time collaborator, Keegan.

The pair had worked together on several other television projects, including Brocklehurst’s series Brassic, which also screens on Stan.

Keegan jumped at the chance to work with the award-winning writer once more. She joins the cast — which also features Faye Marsay, Warren Brown, Rob Collins and Leon Ford — as Kate, “a young nurse who arrives without her fiance and will do whatever it takes to try and rewrite her devastating past”.

She’s brilliant in the role.

“I’d worked with Michelle before on the series Ordinary Lies and Brassic,” Brocklehurst explains. “Early on there was a discussion with the BBC, and I asked Michelle if she’d be interested.

“She loved the idea of Kate’s journey, because she appears to be in a relationship when we first meet her at the port in England, but she arrives in Australia on her own and tells the port official that her fiance didn’t want to come after all. You immediately think, ‘Hang on, that doesn’t sit right.’”

There’s much more to Keegan’s Kate than what appears at first glance.

“My character’s story isn’t about going to start a new life in Australia, hers is rewriting her past,” she explains.

“So, around the war she was a single parent and a young parent, and back then, if you had postnatal depression, it wasn’t talked about . . . Your child got taken off you while you sorted yourself out.

“A lot of orphanages back then used to ship kids over to Australia for adoption, without the knowledge and consent of the parent.”

Could it be that has happened to Kate? It makes for emotional viewing.

As well as Kate’s moving story, we also spend time with the Roberts family (Marsay and Brown star as the parents), who are at the heart of the show.

There’s also an interesting story arc for Rob Collins’ Ron, an Indigenous local struggling with his own issues of identity and belonging.

But it’s Kate’s story that hooks you from the get-go.

“Throughout the series you realise Kate’s on a very personal, heart-wrenching mission, which goes back to the research and some of the things that were happening to single women in the UK at the time,” Brocklehust explains.

“Michelle was perfect for the role — it’s the first time she’s done a period drama and we adapted the script to accommodate some of the things that came out of rehearsals.”

Keegan says she relished the experience, diving headfirst into the role.

“I love playing strong female roles and I think that came from my first job 16 years ago (on Coronation Street),” she explains.

Keegan played feisty Tina McIntyre, a fan favourite on the British soap from 2008 to 2014.

“I first played a very strong female at 19, and I’ve been attracted to feisty, strong female roles (ever since),” she adds. “And I think, as well, because Danny writes very well for the northern (English) actor, because he is northern himself, when I read the script, I connected to it straight away.

“I like gritty roles and something I can get my teeth into — it’s like a journey for me as well. And I feel like that’s what happens with all the characters he writes, there’s always this massive character arc.”

Though she didn’t get the sunny skies she was promised, Keegan loved her experience working in Australia.

Her husband — Keegan is married to The Only Way Is Essex star Mark Wright — joined her for part of her stay, and the pair had a great time living opposite the beach in Bondi.

“On Sunday morning I used to go to the market and get my breakfast and it was so lovely,” she says. “When Mark was here, he was training for a marathon, so it was perfect, and while I was at work, he’d be off training, running up and down the beach.”

Sounds pretty idyllic. Maybe there’s something to be said for that Ten Pound Pom initiative after all?

Keegan agrees.

“I will be honest, I probably would have done it,” she admits.

“Me, I chase the sun, so I probably would have wanted to come across and get away from grey old Manchester.”

Well, there’s always series two . . .

Ten Pound Poms starts May 14 on Stan.