The most controversial aspect of Netflix’s new drama-documentary Queen Cleopatra – not least in Egypt – was the casting of a black actress, Adele James, in the title role. After all, one of the few things that seems certain about Cleopatra’s early life is that she was a Macedonian Greek. Luckily, though, the show had a powerful counterargument to this awkward and Eurocentric fact. As the African-American professor Shelley P. Haley put it with a QED-style flourish, back when she was girl, her beloved (if uneducated) grandmother once said to her: ‘I don’t care what they tell you in school, Cleopatra was black.’

And of course, given the series’ entirely unhidden agenda, being a black woman also means that Cleopatra ‘ruled with unparalleled power’, ‘bowed to no man’ and was basically great at everything. In the talking-heads sections, we were assured again and again what a strong and empowered feminist she’d been. In the drama bits, we saw her whooping male ass in sword fights; proving that she was ‘first and foremost a scholar’ by looking thoughtful beside a pile of manuscripts; poring over military maps while asking her generals, ‘if we target the northern defences, do we leave ourselves vulnerable at our eastern ports?’; giving Julius Caesar handy architectural tips about his new library; and airily besting Cicero in political debate.

Not that any of this prevented her from also being hot in the sack. In the words of another supposed scholar – and apparent clairvoyant: ‘Julius Caesar would never have met a woman like Cleopatra with complete control and confidence in her own possession of her sexuality and her identity.’

If you looked carefully amid the fantasising and wish-fulfilment, the programme did sometimes offer some actual history, with particular reference to the rise of Rome and the related decline of Egyptian power. The obvious trouble, however, is that because of its weirdly unashamed lack of objectivity, you couldn’t trust any of it. Perhaps this is a bit much to lay on a rubbishy Netflix four-parter, but watching Queen Cleopatra felt alarmingly like witnessing the death of scholarship.

Turning to the more recent past, Ten Pound Poms is the latest drama from Danny Brocklehurst – whose work, from Clocking Off onwards, has tended to be perfectly solid in both the good and less good senses of the phrase. On the one hand, there’s the reassuring know-how of an obvious pro. On the other, his essentially on-the-nose approach means that there’s little room for ambiguity – and that the unsaid rarely goes unsaid.

The same is true here, although with the distinct bonus that he’s chosen a fascinating subject. After the second world war, Australia – needing more people and not wanting them to be too foreign – invited mostly working-class Brits to move to the country and start a new life for a tenner. So what could possibly go wrong? The answer, as Brocklehurst makes characteristically clear, was quite a lot.

Sunday’s first episode began with Terry Roberts (Warren Brown) having terrifying flashbacks to his wartime experiences while doing some building work in Stockport. As a result, he was next seen passed out drunk while his kindly but exasperated wife Annie (Faye Marsay) mopped up his vomit with a newspaper that happened to have an advert about how ‘£10 can take you to the land of tomorrow!’

And with that, the couple and their two children boarded a large ship, as Terry announced, ‘This is the start of our new lives.’ On arrival in Sydney, the family duly glimpsed some Chinese people being turned back (‘Whites only,’ a port official obligingly explained). They were then driven by bus past a lot of kangaroos to what looked like a prisoner-of-war camp, causing Terry to exclaim, ‘It looks like a prisoner-of-war camp’, and Annie to spell out that ‘They lied to us. They showed us whitewashed houses and huge gardens.’

And so the programme continued, with the individual scenes carefully laying out one issue each. Until, that is, we had a sudden avalanche of rather histrionic plotting. Again, this was handled with a workmanlike competence. Yet it also left you wondering if Ten Pound Poms has fully decided what kind of show it wants to be: a thoughtful and well-researched microcosmic portrait of what happened to the hundreds of thousands of ordinary postwar British people who moved to Australia, or an incident-packed Sunday-night melodrama. Personally, I’d prefer the former – but maybe that’s why I’m not a BBC1 commissioning editor.