Who\u2019d have thought you could have so much fun with a dusty turret and a green velvet cloak? A vast television audience is anticipated for next week\u2019s final of\u00a0The Celebrity Traitors\u00a0(factoring in catch-up figures, 14.3m tuned in for the launch \u2013 that\u2019s around one in four adults in the UK). An unprecedented audience, despite the fact that, in terms of catching Traitors, this is the all-time worst group of\u00a0Faithfuls\u00a0in the history of the BBC show.<\/p>\n
On Wednesday night \u2013 spoilers incoming \u2013 one of the three Traitors, Jonathan Ross, was finally caught and banished, seven episodes into the nine-episode run. Of the original 19 celebrities, five remain. The surviving Faithful are actor Nick Mohammed, former England rugby player Joe Marler, and historian David Olusoga. The remaining Traitors are singer Cat Burns and comedian and presenter Alan Carr.<\/p>\n
The Celebrity Traitors\u00a0follows the Bafta-winning blueprint of\u00a0The Traitors, which started in 2022, described by presenter Claudia Winkleman as \u201cthe ultimate psychological game of deception\u201d. The formula is the same. Three Traitors, secretly selected by Winkleman, scheme to \u201cmurder\u201d the Faithful; the Faithful try to identify and banish the Traitors at the roundtable. If one or more Traitors remains at the end of next week\u2019s final, they take all the prize money \u2013 a potential \u00a3100,000 amassed from missions \u2013 for their chosen charity. (Each celebrity was also paid a flat \u00a340,000 fee to appear, but the real motivation seems to be the knowledge that this would be a televisual\u00a0event, and for the celebrity superfans, the desire to play the game.)<\/p>\n
The show marks the return of the ultimate broadcasting unicorn: \u201cappointment telly\u201d, with audiences obediently sitting down to watch episodes on the night. So how did The Celebrity Traitors become British television\u2019s most unmissable series?<\/p>\n
The cloak-swishing theatre of the show has passed into TV folklore. The dream-team casting of Stephen Fry, Charlotte Church, Joe Wilkinson, Clare Balding (Sarah Ferguson reportedly declined; that whizzing sound you hear is the BBC dodging a bullet). There was Carr\u2019s initial\u00a0horror at being cast as a Traitor: \u201cI have a sweating problem and I can\u2019t keep a secret\u201d; Paloma Faith\u2019s fury at being killed first, betrayed by Carr, a close friend; Celia Imrie\u2019s fart: \u201cI\u2019m so sorry, it\u2019s nerves \u2013 but I always own up\u201d; Tom Daley giving Kate Garraway Olympic-grade side-eye. And more. Unscripted. Hilarious. Addictive. Excruciating in all the best ways.\u00a0The Celebrity Traitors\u00a0has been manna from autumn TV scheduling heaven.<\/p>\n
Then there\u2019s the Claudia Factor. The presenter recently resigned, along. with co-host Tess Daly, from Strictly Come Dancing. It\u2019s reported that Winkleman is being given her own BBC chat show on the strength of her success with Traitors, which makes sense. Working an undead-St Trinian\u2019s-style palette (fringe; tweed; big jumpers; repeat), Winkleman presides like a primetime Mrs Danvers over the Traitors castle, extending the frostiest of welcomes to contestants. Without the idiosyncrasy of Claudia Winkleman\u2019s presenting, the British series wouldn\u2019t be the same.<\/p>\n
The Traitors,\u00a0with its fabled olde worlde ambiance \u2013 the setting of Ardross Castle in the Highlands; Winkleman\u2019s quasi-aristo hauteur; the Arthurian roundtable \u2013 feels as British as Sebastian Flyte\u2019s teddy bear. But it is, in fact, based on the Dutch show,\u00a0De Verraders, first broadcast in 2021, and itself deemed to be a twist on the party game Mafia, devised by\u00a0Moscow\u00a0University student Dimma Davidoff, and a favourite of Silicone Valley tech bros. De Verraders creator Marc Pos viewed the show as a \u201csocial experiment\u201d, saying: \u201cI wanted to watch people who don\u2019t trust each other.\u201d<\/p>\n
A few years on,\u00a0The Traitors has become\u00a0an established global brand. There\u2019s The\u00a0Traitors US\u00a0(host, Alan Cumming, rivalling Winkleman for stonewalling and avant-garde regalia),\u00a0Traitors Australia, The Traitors New Zealand,\u00a0The Traitors Canada, and myriad other international territories including India, Poland and the Czech Republic.\u00a0The Traitors Ireland, hosted by Siobh\u00e1n McSweeney (Derry Girls) aired earlier this year, and will be available elsewhere soon.<\/p>\n
The Traitors\u00a0has also generated a satellite industry of copycat shows of varying quality as broadcasters scrabble to sate public appetite for gameshow treachery. These include:\u00a0The Fortune Hotel\u00a0on ITV1 with Stephen Mangan (OK);\u00a0The Inheritance\u00a0on Channel 5 with Liz Hurley and Rob Rinder (a hyper-camp sugar rush);\u00a0Million Dollar Secret\u00a0on Netflix with Peter Serafinowicz (erm); ITV1\u2019s\u00a0The Genius Game\u00a0with David Tennant (quietly cancelled after one series), to name but a few. As a broadcasting model,\u00a0The Traitors\u00a0is proving difficult to replicate, but it\u2019s not for want of trying.<\/p>\n
One thing that sets The Traitors apart is its strength as a \u201cwatercooler\u201d conversation-starter. Is it a chilling Orwellian exercise in cloak-rustling group-think? A game of skill and people-watching? Could our post-Covid generation be responding to the isolation and paranoia of the show? Is its popularity in the UK primarily based on being the \u201ccosy crime\u201d home nation of Agatha Christie? Or is The Traitors a televisual microscope-slide of human nature at its worst, and suggestibility at its strongest? Talking at the Edinburgh TV festival, Stephen Lambert, whose production company Studio Lambert makes the UK and US versions of\u00a0The Traitors, observed that watching the Faithful make firm decisions based on scant evidence has shaken his faith in the British jury system.<\/p>\n
Another key facet of\u00a0The Celebrity Traitors\u00a0has been the protectiveness over the family-viewing format. The celebrity version was made under the same strict conditions as the \u201ccivilian\u201d show, with contestants isolated in a nearby airport hotel and sworn to secrecy. Ross was reproached for discussing mundane details, such as the confiscation of contestant phones and devices. There were no politicians or otherwise controversial characters in the cast. While former speaker of the house John Bercow appeared on the second series of The Traitors US (which casts famous people), he would have been unlikely to get on to the British version, never mind Nigel Farage or Matt Hancock (formerly of I\u2019m a Celebrity\u2026).\u00a0The Celebrity Traitors\u00a0is reality television behaving itself.<\/p>\n
Nonetheless,\u00a0Traitors\u00a0purists were wary of a celebrity version of the UK show. Would the unalloyed machiavellian quality of The Traitors\u00a0be hampered by concerns over image preservation? There were reports of celebrity PRs worrying about how their clients were coming across. Would there be the same insights into the human condition \u2013 how people manage stress? how they tell lies? \u2013 or would there simply be insights into micromanaged celebrity?<\/p>\n
The\u00a0Traitors\u00a0is democratic \u2013 the celebrity version, at least in earlier episodes, seemed to suffer from a clash between national treasures and newer faces. The first Faithful to be banished was content creator, Niko Omilana, who has eight million YouTube followers, but is less familiar to older viewers. Actor Ruth Codd has spoken of an unspoken hierarchy on the show, placing lesser-known people like her at a disadvantage. While Ross was the first Traitor to fall, it\u2019s arguable that such a flamboyant character\u00a0 \u2013 dubbed a \u201cbig dog\u201d by Marler and Wilkinson \u2013 would have been ousted quicker in the civilian show.<\/p>\n
This is not to suggest that the celebrity influx ruined\u00a0The Traitors, just that it may have changed it. Does it matter? No, it\u2019s been far too much fun. It seems odd to say of a gameshow based on murder, but the main challenge facing The Traitors is overkill. A new fourth series of the regular Traitors\u00a0is expected to air in January.\u00a0 People are already being asked to apply for the series after that. This is the Achilles heel of broadcasting: the pumping of a format until it explodes or perishes.<\/p>\n
Otherwise, I have no argument with a TV show that made me convulse with laughter at the sight of Daley at Faith\u2019s funeral, posing with his shirt unbuttoned practically to his navel, like a stylish serial killer. The series\u00a0hasn\u2019t been perfect: the padding; the still-dreary missions; the Faithfuls\u2019 bizarre\u00a0over-solicitous\u00a0rota-system with the shields. But anyone with any sense will be grabbing their lanterns and making their way to the turret for the final. Whatever else\u00a0The Celebrity Traitors\u00a0phenomenon is or isn\u2019t, it\u2019s television to die for.<\/p>\n
Photograph by BBC\/Studio Lambert\/CodyBurridge<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Who\u2019d have thought you could have so much fun with a dusty turret and a green velvet cloak?…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":241438,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[96,391,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-241437","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tv","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-tv","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/241437","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=241437"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/241437\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/241438"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=241437"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=241437"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=241437"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}