She made her name as glamorous and sexy Tanya Turner in Footballers’ Wives.
But now Huddersfield actress Zoe Lucker is going to the other extreme.
Gone are the expensive dresses, glittering jewellery and fake tan.
And in are rags for clothes, an unwashed face and a mountain of stinking rubbish.
Zoe, 41, who was brought up in Lindley is one of six celebrities travel back in time to the relentless graft of Victorian Britain in a new TV series.
They will be spending four days in four different 19th-century workplaces.
It’s being described as “hardcore and filthy”.
The celebrities’ first 24 hours lands them in the filth and grime of the city dump - the dustyard. Here, they must sift through mountains of dirt, rotting vegetables and old bones. With thousands of people flooding into cities to find work in the new factories, there is a whole lot of horse manure and human effluent to clean up.
Joining Zoe on the show are former Home Office minister Anne Widdecombe, impressionist Alistair McGowan, world champion hurdler Colin Jackson, Outnumbered’s Tyger Drew-Honey and presenter Miquita Oliver.
They line up for the new history show 24 Hours In The Past which is to be presented from next Tuesday by presenter Fi Glover and historian Ruth Goodman.
They will be denied all modern luxuries, and instead will have to survive all the grime and muck of 19th century Britain. as they spend four days working in four gruelling environments, from a Victorian rubbish tip to the workhouse.
They will eat, sleep, dress and work to match the period, and find out what life was really like for Victorian workers in the new “hard-core” history reality series, set to air later this year and billed as “living history as you’ve never seen it before, complete with rats, poo and rotting meat…”
Radio presenter Glover will front the four-part BBC1 series, first announced in November last year, while historian Goodman will judge the celebrities on how they cope with the period challenges.
“24 Hours in the Past will bring living history to BBC1 in a hard-core way,” said BBC1 Controller Charlotte Moore.
“Viewers will get up close and personal with what it was like to be poor in Victorian Britain in this new series, as these six famous faces travel back in time to undertake the endurance challenge of a lifetime.”
The show is screened at 9pm on April 28.
FACTFILE
Zoe was born in Lindley in April 1974
Her first taste of the stage came at the Huddersfield-based Oscars Academy of Performing Arts
She had fleeting appearances in the likes of Coronation Street, Where The Heart Is and Barbara
Her big break came when Footballers’ Wives aired in 2002 and she was cast as a superbitch
She has subsequently been in hit dramas including Waterloo Road, EastEnders and Holby Blue
Zoe is now behind bars as a prisoner in Hollyoaks
