24 Hours in the Past

Six celebrities travel back in time to the relentless graft of Victorian Britain, spending four days in four different 19th-century workplaces. Their first 24 hours lands them in the filth and grime of the city dump - the dustyard. Here, they must sift through mountains of dirt, rotting vegetables and old bones. With thousands of people flooding into cities to find work in the new factories, there is a whole lot of horse manure and human effluent to clean up.

With no break since leaving the filth of the dustyard, Alistair McGowan, Ann Widdecombe, Miquita Oliver, Zoe Lucker, Tyger Drew Honey and Colin Jackson are now up against the clock in the age before the dawn of the railways. There are horses to be groomed, coaches cleaned, tack polished, guests to be fed, linen to be laundered, chamber pots emptied and landlord's scams to be learned. With two more days, two more workplaces, two more episodes to go, who will have the stamina to survive the long hours and relentless grind that was the lot of the Victorian working poor?

Amidst the bottle kilns of the Staffordshire potteries, it's not just the machinery that's revolutionary! With no break since leaving the 19th-century equivalent of the motorway services - the coaching inn - Alistair McGowan, Ann Widdecombe, Miquita Oliver, Zoe Lucker, Tyger Drew-Honey and Colin Jackson now have kilns to keep alight, clay to prep and pots to make. It's hard work for very little pay and dissent is in the air. Will our apprentice potters, like their forebears, take up the call to arms for better working conditions and pay?

Launching yet another rebellion, former minister for prisons Ann Widdecombe gets thrown into solitary confinement. Our other inmates include actress Zoe Lucker, former world champion hurdler Colin Jackson, impressionist Alistair McGowan, Outnumbered actor Tyger Drew-Honey and presenter Miquita Oliver. When world champion athlete Colin Jackson admits the work is too much for him, what chance do our other inmates stand of proving they have what it takes to work their way out of the workhouse?