A Sunderland man has plunged into a challenge to bathe in bubble tea for 24 hours.
Michael Tuckwell, 36, got into the bath at 3pm on Friday and spent the next 24 hours submerged to his neck in litres of the drink provided by Manhua Cha.
The "crazy" challenge coincided with National Bubble Tea Day on Saturday. Bubble tea is a tea drink with the addition of chewy tapioca balls, known as boba. It originated in Taiwan but has been growing in popularity in the UK.
Sunderland's Geek Retreat on John Street, provided a portion of their shop for him to complete the challenge, where he and business partner Donna Yeoman set up a live stream of proceedings for viewers around the world.
Speaking to ChronicleLive about his endeavour, Michael said: "It's been wet and cold. It's one of those things where we come up with crazy ideas all the time for stunts to do or things for promotion for our events, and sometimes we do them at the events.
"With Covid, we haven't been able to go out and meet people and do anything - and this one was easy as we knew the people who do the bubble tea, Manhua Cha.
"Geek Retreat is local and we thought 'you know what, we'll go ahead and try this one' and both of them said yes, so here I am in a bath tub.
"This is all for growing the community as well, YouTube is such a far-reaching social network and it's one of those one that people underestimate. They think that it's just random people screaming at video games or people doing pranks and what not.
"It's a huge business opportunity and we as an event need to expand outside to different markets and with our event only being once a year it's 360-odd days a year that we're not really working on anything."
Michael hopes to promote SunnyCon though his bathtub challenge - a local anime expo which he founded in 2010 and launched in 2012 at the former Crowtree Leisure Centre in Sunderland. Over the years, Michael and his business partners have developed the annual event, growing its initial attendance in the hundreds to crowds of thousands.
And after a two year lay-off due to the global coronavirus pandemic, Michael hopes that this year's event at St James' Park will be bigger and better than ever.
He continued: "It's been a tough one but we've ploughed through. Things are getting back to normal now, so we're happy that it's going to come back together.
"Hopefully people will see this, they'll go out and look at the event and hopefully buy some tickets.
"We've got a wide range of artists and traders - I think we've got over 300 tables worth of them - from all over the country, specialising in things such as anime merch to food, artists with their own individual styles based loosely around Japanese anime cartoons.
"We've also got voice actor guests - Richard Epcar who does the voice of the Joker in the Injustice games, he's also Raiden in Mortal Combat."
SunnyCon will take place at St James' Park from June 24-26. To find out more, visit their official site, here.
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