Tuesday 20 April 9.00-10.00pm BBC THREE

Six young consumers from a variety of backgrounds in Britain swap their lives for the simple mud huts and shanty towns of Africa and Asia, where they work alongside the people who mine, manufacture, process and recycle our luxury goods, in a new series exploring the human cost of making these luxuries.

It follows the success of Blood, Sweat And Takeaways (broadcast in 2009), which explored the human cost of food production in South East Asia and was the highest-ever rating factual programme on BBC Three. Following its successful showing on BBC Three, it was repeated on BBC One. The first series, Blood, Sweat And T-Shirts, earned a Bafta nomination.

In Britain today, what were once seen as luxury goods are fast becoming everyday items. From electrical gadgets to leather handbags and shoes, as we consume more and more these products are becoming increasingly disposable.

But would we care more if we knew the human cost of making our luxuries?

In the first programme, the six Brits head to the isolated mining town of Ilakaka in Madagascar to discover where the gems and jewellery found on the British high street come from – a side of Madagascar that has not been seen before on British television. Here, they live alongside mine workers in their simple homes.

In the vast open pit mines they join hundreds of workers in chain gangs, digging for one of the most sought-after gems in the world – sapphires. On average, one worker per day dies in these pits. But when the back-breaking work gets too much for consumers James, Alexandria and Lucy, they’re shocked to discover the alternative – a makeshift 50ft-deep mine shaft, inside the front room of someone’s house, which can only be accessed by rope and pulley. Each day, the workers do two four-hour shifts to bring up 12 bags of gravel, which they must then move to the river where they sift through it looking for gems. There is no oxygen so far down the shaft, so they must fill bags with air and pump it in to the mine shaft just so that they can breathe.

It’s not just the extreme working conditions and hand-to-mouth existence of the locals, who earn a very basic living wage of one pound a day for their work, that shock the Brits, but that the value of the rough stones is so cheap compared to the jewellery on sale in our shops.