Joe Swash has uncovered new details about his late father Ricky’s family history while filming the new series of Who Do You Think You Are?, and the discoveries left him emotional. The presenter said the search through his paternal line brought him to tears as he learned where the family came from and how far back the story ran.
The timing matters because this is the first time Swash has been seen digging into his own past on the programme, giving him a chance to piece together parts of Ricky’s life that were lost when his father died at 39, when Joe was 12. He said the experience made him feel closer to Ricky, but it also carried a quiet ache: the chance to tell his father what he had found is gone.
Swash said his home in Islington was “a house full of sadness and grief” after Ricky died, and that he spent much of that period trying to get through it. He had his first television appearance in an Andrex commercial at seven, later went on to parts in You Rang, M'Lord?, Casualty, The Bill and London's Burning, and by the time he became Mickey Miller in EastEnders in 2003, Ricky was no longer alive to see it. His father also missed Swash’s wins on I’m A Celebrity... in 2008 and Dancing On Ice in 2020, and never met Stacey Solomon or the family Swash has built with her.
What he found went well beyond a family tree. Swash said he already knew Ricky was part English and part Italian, but the research took him from Islington and Clerkenwell to a remote village in the mountains outside Naples, where his paternal line began with the surname Raimo. His great-great-grandfather, Giuseppe Raimo, left Italy and the life of a peasant farmer for London, worked as a street piano player and was recorded attending meetings organised by Emmeline Pankhurst, linking Swash’s family to the suffragette movement.
That discovery landed close to home in more ways than one. Swash said where he grew up in Islington is only a stone’s throw from where his Italian relatives first settled in London, and that he has always felt a connection to that side of his family. He said he felt pride when he found out about Giuseppe, and that his father would have loved to make the same journey into the family history himself. Instead, the knowledge now belongs to Swash alone, even as it changes the story he can pass on to Stacey Solomon and their three children, Rex, Rose and Belle, along with Harry, his son with Emma Sophocleous.
His full episode in the new series of Who Do You Think You Are? is the next step, and it will show just how much of that lost family story he has been able to recover.
