There is a sweetly retro feel to Brits Down Under, as if it is a relic of a more gentle age. If it wasn’t for the smartphones and the occasional bit of contemporary slang, you could imagine that this show has been sitting on a shelf in a TV company’s cleaning cupboard for years, next to Dinner Date and Shipwrecked. It shares a narrator, Natalie Casey, with Dinner Date, and some DNA with both of them.
The premise is very simple: a group of aimless British backpackers, in their 20s, interrupt their city-hopping travelling experience for a spell on a farm deep in the southern Australian outback, where they will work for bed and board. We follow them as they learn how to hammer in a fence pole – or, more accurately, demonstrate the least efficient way to hammer in a fence pole ever seen – and learn to value hard work, and therefore, the idea goes, they will learn how to value themselves, too.
The farmer in charge is Grant, a typically blunt Aussie who has been working on a farm since he was eight years old. “I do swear a lot,” he admits, before quipping, “I got that from my mother.” His 10-acre farmstay gives the backpackers a home, in the form of a dorm with bunkbeds, while he either assigns them work at his own place or sends them off to his neighbours’ farms for paid employment, depending on their skills.
Initially, those skills are in short supply, but obviously, the narrative of the feckless youth is set in stone before anyone arrives. The Brits range from early to late 20s, and focus is on the ones who lack direction. Joanne is 27, but says, “I’m just not ready to be an adult yet.” Annise is 28, and went to Australia in search of a “new me” only to find that $900 didn’t get her very far, and she quickly became jobless and homeless. Only one of the Brits has a backpack; the rest arrive with wheelie cases, rolling them up the dirt path, gloriously, defiantly impractical.
Everything you might expect to happen does happen. The ones who don’t like authority kick off when they’re told how to perform their tasks correctly. One of the women says she has changed jobs seven times in a year, because she doesn’t like an “arsehole boss”. It will come as no surprise that she and Grant quickly butt heads. Someone else turns up at a local vineyard wearing Crocs, before being sent back to change into the legally mandated work boots. Some of them hate hard work, then some of them learn that it can be satisfying to stick with a task and complete it. Grant turns out to be more caring than authoritarian, and his partner, Maëva, is a maternal presence who keeps an eye on everyone and makes sure they aren’t too homesick or lonely. Wolf Creek, it ain’t.
It’s early days, but so far, this is nice, gentle reality TV, a show that is too warm to dwell on any of the friction, and the eye-rolling at the limits of Gen Z quickly exhausts itself. Most of the twentysomethings are diligent and keen to experience something new, even if they’ve never done farm work or manual labour before. Some seem a little spoiled; some are peacemakers, such as the Paul Mescal-esque Alfie, who acts as a translator between the brusque Grant and his backpackers. This comes in handy when Grant employs a metaphor about herd mentality that involves poetically comparing his young charges to horses. “I’m not a horse, or whatever,” huffs Annise, insisting that she is “ready to walk away”. (She doesn’t.)
Much like the experience of Prince Harry, who had his own spell in the outback and came away with the nickname Spike, this looks as if it will be transformative for the young adults who are open to it, and nightmarish for the ones who are not. When they talk about their lack of prospects in the UK and the dead-end jobs they are expected to get used to here, there are probably wider points to be made about late-capitalist malaise. That’s not for this kind of show, though, and if that subtext is there, it is buried as deep as those fence poles.
The dramatic stakes are low, then, and it isn’t particularly essential. A cat poos in the dorm, someone clips a wire they weren’t supposed to clip, and everyone goes to bed exhausted. Yet it’s surprisingly moreish. And any show that ends an episode with a cliffhanger such as “Grant’s sending Annise to work at the local goat farm tomorrow” is fine by me.
• Brits Down Under is on Channel 4.
