24 Hours in the Past, BBC One

The past is a foreign country. Celebrities do things differently there. Programmes which put people in time machines and whizz them back to a less centrally heated era have been around for a while. Back in the day they’d pick on ordinary people and make them live as a skivs and drudges in some specifically benighted era before the invention of such new-fangled concepts as electricity or the flush mechanism or gender equality. But that was then.

24 Hours in the Past is actually a week in the 19th century, diced up into episodes. After one hour in a Victorian dustyard we’re already well acquainted with how grim life was for those at the bottom of the heap. It was, in every conceivable sense, shit. Togged up in stinking Victorian outfits, half a dozen guinea pigs spent their working day shovelling, sorting and, where necessary, handling faecal matter produced by horses, dogs and humans. Impressively, only Miquita Oliver vomited.

You never see any of this in the adaptations of Victorian doorstoppers. Three quarters of all Victorians were working class but Trollope, Eliot and the Brontës tended to tell of the middle and upper echelons. Even Dickens was a bit coy about putting a name to a stench. There is a big old dustheap in Our Mutual Friend but he never peers too closely at its contents. Here we found out more. Zöe Lucker scoured the street, manually sorting dog shit (good for tanning leather) from horse shit. Alistair McGowan scrubbed up bones for soap. Colin Jackson washed filthy rags. Ann Widdecombe failed to beat seven shades of shit out of a dusty rug. Tyger Drew-Honey seemed to spend most of his time scampishly auditioning for the role of the Artful Dodger, and duly had his pay docked by a scrapyard owner who pranced about in a top hat, shouting.

They all seemed to take to their tasks with humility and humour. Let us gloss over the fact that the dirty half dozen are being handsomely paid to work for a few pennies a day (fewer, of course, for the women). They still had to use a privy and kip on a cold kitchen floor. “Wow, this is serious,” said Drew-Honey (pictured above) when he clapped eyes on his dingy sleeping quarters. McGowan did the odd impression to jolly things along, and Widdecombe was all bustling good sense as she accepted with dogged fortitude the vicissitudes of the market. “No human being who had any choice would do this,” she said. “Our ancestors had no choice.”

It was entertaining, but it was also properly instructive about the truly horrific existence endured by many of our forebears. While presenter Fi Glover strode about the mocked-up Victorian townscape in contemporary threads dispensing horrid stats, a period expert in a bonnet was on hand to explain and elucidate. “We’ve got it so easy,” concluded Lucker, wearing not a scrap of mascara. Now, what’s the number to text to vote for one of them do extra scrubbing?