Swash to chomp down witchetty grubs

5:47pm Monday 17th November 2008

Joe Swash's stomach will be truly tested when he chomps down witchetty grubs in I'm a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here!

The unappetising Bushtucker trial, called I Scream Van, will pit the former EastEnders actor against Page 3 model and footballer's WAG Nicola McClean.

The eighth series of the ratings-grabbing show began on Sunday and saw the public vote for the two celebrities to face the first stomach-churning trial.

Swash, who played Micky Miller in the BBC's popular soap, has already been dubbed the "Jade of the jungle".

In the opening show he dropped clangers in much the same vein as the comments that shot Jade Goody to fame in 2002.

She generated massive publicity as a Big Brother contestant with questions such as "Rio de Janeiro, ain't that a person?" and whether "East Angular" was abroad.

Swash, 26, appeared to have already coined a similar line in "Swashisms", when he asked his fellow contestant, the tennis star Martina Navratilova, about her home country the Czech Republic.

"Is that near Prague?" he said, to which she explained that Prague was the capital.

He also insisted that he had three stops en route to Australia from London - "Kuala Lumpur and Sydney" - as the other celebrities told him that actually constituted just two.

Bookmakers have tipped Swash as the 4/1 favourite to win the show, but 52-year-old Navratilova, though joint third in the odds at 6/1, has so far proved more attractive to punters.