The territorial and cultural peak of the Roman Empire was also the moment it began its irreversible decline: once you reach the top there is nowhere to go but down. You wonder if this logic also applies to The Traitors and whether, decades hence, historians will trace the downfall of the back-stabbing franchise to the moment Paudie Moloney declared he wasn’t a hugger. It was never going to get any better than that.
That was top Traitors – and since then it’s been down all the way, first with an underwhelming second series of The Traitors Ireland and now with the joyless and thrill-free return of the BBC’s Celebrity Traitors. How did it go so wrong so quickly – and why has the second time out for Celebrity Traitors failed to reach the duplicitous heights of the first year?
The simple answer is that these Traitors seem to have no idea what they are doing – and that most of them don’t even want to be Traitors. First Richard E Grant self-immolated by declaring that he was a Traitor – an admission that not all the back-pedalling in the world could wave away.
Next it became increasingly obvious that James Acaster is the worst Traitor in the history of the show – in that he seems to be of the opinion that getting into the spirit of a ridiculous parlour game would be a stain on his soul. Then he and Maya Jama recruited top telly boffin Hannah Fry – another Traitor who doesn’t want to actually murder anyone.
The Faithful, meanwhile, are in just as big a flap. They are either entirely clueless and running around accusing the wrong people (James Blunt) or they are playing the “keep a low profile” game and thus essentially removing themselves from the fun (Michael Sheen). Then there is the third category, represented exclusively by Ross Kemp, whose paranoia bubbled straight to the surface so that by the end of episode one he’d turned into Marlon Brando at the end of Apocalypse Now.
Week three of the contest has at least advanced the story to the extent that the Faithful have turfed out another Traitor in Fry – using the logic that she’s a professional clever clogs, so of course the Traitors would recruit her. That proved to be exactly the case − but the maths whiz’s number was so clearly up from the outset that there is no dramatic tension.
Will this tepid Traitors find a way to raise the temperature in the time remaining to it? There are indications that token Irish contestant Joanne McNally could be in hot water – because of her habit of nominating completely random Faithful, which Fry, before her departure, identified as the actions of a desperate Traitor.
So maybe McNally will have to face some scrutiny and perhaps The Celebrity Traitors will finally develop a pulse. It will have been a long time coming – to date, this celebration of murder and mayhem has been as dull as the grey cardigan Claudia wore to the latest round table.