Former I’m A Celeb star Joey Essex reveals what the Bushtucker Trials taste like
Joey Essex had to eat turkey testicles (Picture: ITV/REX) Joey Essex starred in the 2013 series of I..
Joey Essex starred in the 2013 series of I’m A Celebrity, and the memory of the vile eating task, still hasn’t left him.
Georgia Toffolo and Rebekah Vardy took part in this year’s challenge, and won themselves a few fans for their brevity.
Not least Joey, who was in the same seat three years before – and can now publicly say he’s had a camel toe in his mouth.
‘The camel toe was quite easy to eat,’ he confessed exclusively to Metro.co.uk. ‘It tasted like a really hard piece of rubber you couldn’t actually physically chew.
‘But the pigs brain, I can’t even explain it. Imagine what a brain would be like if you cooked it, it would be really mushy.’
He added that scooping up the brain matter was absolute ‘filth’.
‘It’s like liver paste. It was an actual brain, it had the things in it still, it was a proper brain. It was filth,’ he said.
But for poor Joey, the moment that truly won’t leave him is the one where a turkey’s testicle exploded in his mouth – and for those who want to know, it tasted ‘sweet’ apparently.
‘I ate a turkey testicle, that was ridiculous,’ he said. ‘It tasted sweet. You know when you get a new sweet and it’s a ball and you put it in your mouth and it bursts open, that’s what it was.’ Sounds delicious.
‘I remember thinking ‘what am I doing?’ that was my first day. I think my year was the year they threw people in the deep end.’
He also revealed that to do some of these vile tasks, they’re packed off in cars as they’re nowhere near camp.
‘All the trials are in different places,’ he blabbed. ‘Some are a walk away so 15, 20 minutes. Some you get into cars, but it’s completely blacked out . Everyone’s got their watches taped up so you don’t know the time.’
But for Joey, worse than not knowing what day it was, or having to but a ball in his mouth, was not being able to eat.
‘My journey was so different to most people,’ he said. ‘As I did most of the trials at the start I was proper weak. You don’t eat in there, you’re really tired. Imagine not eating at all, being really really hungry, no energy.’ Well how ungrateful, you were given a monkey brain for goodness sake.
‘I’ve never felt the way I did in the jungle about energy,’ he added. ‘When you get to the point when you’re starving you eat, but I had no choice, I couldn’t eat. So I had no energy and I was having to push myself to get up. No one in the camp knew or cared, they thought I was having fun in my trials. But I didn’t complain.’
Joey’s now testing himself in a whole different way – he’s become the face of Playstation’s new game called Knowledge Is Power.
Might find it easier to eat a monkey brain.
‘I love Playstation,’ he told us. ‘And they thought who better to front a quiz than me, Joey Essex?’
Knowledge Is Power is out now.
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