The Workhouse - Fishlock's Wales

"Please sir, I want some more." The moment when Oliver Twist, a pale, half-starved boy, asks for another helping of gruel is one of the great heart-tugging scenes of literature and film.

In his description of Oliver's wretchedness Charles Dickens encapsulated the horrors of the Victorian workhouses he detested. To his mind they stood for only one thing: inhumanity.

There was a time when the very word workhouse made people shudder. They were built to be forbidding and frightening, a deterrent, places of humiliation where husbands and wives were separated.

The old workhouse at Llanfyllin in mid-Wales, built in 1840, is one of the best-preserved in Britain. Writer Trevor Fishlock and programme director Catherine Gorman went there to tell its story for Fishlock's Wales. "It was a moving experience," Trevor says. "The walls and rooms remain as monuments to suffering. We also found remarkable and inspiring human stories. There's more than meets the eye."

The programme shows excerpts from plays about workhouse life written and acted in the old building by students at Llanfyllin high school.

A group of Llanfyllin people are working to keep and restore the old building, to make it work for the community.

In its later years the workhouse was a social services institution. In one of the programme's stories Rita Harrison tells of her time there, of meeting Ryan Davies, who became a star entertainer - and of her first kiss.

'The Workhouse', Fishlock's Wales, tonight at 8pm on ITV1 Wales