Just as an exercise (as I'm still trying to master 2D arrays) I thought I'd try to roll my own solution. Here it is, FWIW:

use strict;
use warnings;
my @ary = (
   [ 'fred', 'barney' ],
   [ 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 ],
   [ 'george', 'jane', 'elroy' ],
   [ 'homer' ]
); 
my $str = '';
for ( @ary ) {
   unshift @$_, $#$_;
   $str .= "\0" if $str;
   $str .= join "\0", @$_;
}
# And then at the other end:
my @in = split /\0/, $str;
my @new_ary;
push @new_ary, [ splice @in, 0, shift @in ] while @in; 
print "@$_\n" for @new_ary;
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Comments more than welcome