Airdate: Queen Victoria’s Slum, Meet the Humans.

Dr Michael Mosley will front two new factual formats screening on SBS in July: historical re-enactment Queen Victoria’s Slum and social experiment Meet the Humans.

The former screened in the UK last year but the latter premiered this month.

In Queen Victoria’s Slum, Michael Mosley takes a group of modern 21st century British families back in time to see if they can survive the grim conditions of a late-Victorian slum.

A large Victorian building in the heart of London’s East End is recreated to be as it was in the 1860s, when it was home to the working class, hoping to make it in the world’s most exciting city. Families, couples and individuals move in for four weeks in an ambitious living history experiment.

Each episode follows the participants’ lives in the slum as they are hit by five decades of changes in the law, society, trade and politics of late 19th-century Britain.

Their first task is to come to grips with the slum economy, where the main priority is scraping together money for rent and food by quickly learning traditional Victorian trades such as tailoring old rags for new clothes, matchbox making, selling vegetables and wood turning. But soon an economic depression, overpopulation, immigration and an acute housing shortage significantly worsen everyday conditions in shocking ways for the participants as the realities of Victorian slum life set in.

In Meet the Humans, a sprawling country manor is rigged with surveillance cameras and contributors fitted with observational devices for an experiment into human behaviour.

Six unwitting participants are invited to take part in a range of group activities, from a flirty singles night to awkward team-building games. Actors and stooges are thrown in to manipulate the action.

From inside an observational room, Dr Michael Mosley along with experts neuroscientist Dr Jack Lewis and psychologist Anna Machin analyse the group’s every move. The latest scientific studies, facial trackers and biomechanical software is used to unpack the evolutionary factors and instincts that drive ordinary human behaviour.

Queen Victoria’s Slum Tuesday 4 July, 7.30pm
Meet the Humans Monday 10 July, 7.30pm.