Victorian England's workhouses were built to make poverty feel like a punishment, and this film traces what that meant through the family histories of Fern Britton, Brian Cox, and other well-known faces who go looking for ancestors who ended up inside one. Genealogical records and workhouse ledgers turn up real names and real admissions: children separated from parents, elderly laborers stripped of independence, families broken apart simply for being poor. Historians walk through surviving workhouse buildings and archives to explain the system's logic, from the labor demanded of inmates to the deliberate harshness meant to discourage anyone from asking for help. Each celebrity's reaction to finding an ancestor's entry in the record gives the history a personal edge, turning statistics about Victorian poverty into specific, documented lives. The first of a two-part series, it stays grounded in primary sources rather than generalization, using one family's paperwork at a time to show how the system actually operated on the ground.