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.
