TV audiences have never been more splintered, scattered across streaming and online platforms, no two people agreeing on what to huddle around. But a reported 6.5 million viewers tuned into the first episode of Celebrity Traitors last week, breaking all previous records for the show. It’ll be more like 10 million once the catch-up figures are included.
What’s brilliant about the Traitors format is the conversation it’s having with its audience. It was summed up best by contestant Stephen Fry, one of the A-list signings in an impressive line-up for the first celebrity series. “Nobody can spot a liar,” he said when host Claudia Winkleman asked him how he’d go about hunting the traitors. And if they do, he added, it’s probably “through a slip. Not through this gut instinct that we put so much value on”.
It cannot be overstated the genius trick theTraitors format has pulled off in creating appointment-to-view television from what effectively boils down to a game of ultra camp wink murder. They’ve essentially scaled up an ancient parlour game to gothic proportions and now - three series in, they’ve added 20 celebrities and will have us in their inky leather grasp until Halloween and then again in January when the civilian series returns.
For any of you who have yet to see an episode, this is how the game works: as with wink murder, around 20 players are gathered in a circle and shut their eyes, then Claudia Winkleman - in full goth chic - silently dubs a handful of them “traitors” - or murderers. The rest of the group must try to work out who they are as they go about the group daily tasks while on a secret, silent killing spree.
Stephen Fry in Celebrity Traitors. Photo: BBC/Studio Lambert/Euan Cherry
Back to Fry’s point, we all ‘reckon’ we can spot a phoney. That we are invulnerable to a grift. And while we’re watching The Traitors, we are, because delicious dramatic irony allows us in on the secret while the contestants flounder in the dark. The show makes us complicit, getting us to root for the bad guys. What better way to manipulate an audience so certain of their own ability to judge others?
We flatter ourselves that deceit is somehow obvious or has a smell like gas. They put the smell INTO the gas, lads. The gas itself is odourless.
In each version of the show I’ve seen, here, in America or Australia (and we’ll get the Irish version on iPlayer in November), contestants are convinced that if they ask the right question, make the right deduction, interpret some key piece of body language, they’ll be able to work out who is hiding ill intent.
And they never can. In The Traitors, as in life, if someone is a good liar, they can pull the wool over your eyes no matter who you are. We kid ourselves that we can’t be fooled, but it just isn’t true. Watching The Traitors, we get to be immune because we know and see all.
Add to the mix a cast of celebrities and the game has changed again. Because, as contestant Alan Carr so perfectly puts it, “You know what celebrities are like, they’re two-faced.” Showbusiness is not, it mightn’t surprise you to know, peopled with sweethearts who would do anything for each other. To get to the top, however you portray yourself, you must have a core of steel, because it’s the most competitive, overcrowded game in town.
Work and social life overlap at awards ceremonies and parties. Stars’ game-faces are always on as they ally themselves with those they think might be useful to them. Of course, real friendships exist too, but they’re indistinguishable from the strategic ones. Back at the Scottish castle, some of the contestants already know one another, making the game of ‘spot the fake’ even more knotty and the paranoia even greater among the contestants. Who’s the fake? It takes one to know one.
Author and TV critic Julia Raeside
What the celebs might not have appreciated when eagerly signing up is that there’s nowhere to hide in a Traitors edit. Those story producers are trained to find the spindly threads of truth and weave them into rich tapestries of emotional certitude. Already, some contestants are finding themselves exposed. Kate Garraway is in several people’s sights for her perceived overreactions to twists in the game. Jonathan Ross will be lucky if anyone ever trusts him again, so good is he at appearing innocent at all times while he lies through his veneers.
Meanwhile, Nick Mohammed has quietly removed Fry’s coronet as King of Brains by most humbly and nimbly destroying every puzzle during the first prize task. And he dug for national treasure Celia Imrie’s immunity shield before his own in the grave-digging task that opened episode one, ensuring she was protected from the first murder. Could his apparent genuine niceness be his USP and take him all the way to the final? The early money seems to be on him.
Former Olympic diver, Tom Daley, is about to launch his presenting career with a Channel 4 knitting show and has already leapt to the fore with his excessive side-eyeing of Garraway’s dramatics. As things stand, his tender spite is proving very funny, but the edit could tip him into full villain territory if he’s not careful. It’s only us that sees the micro expressions of despair in Kate Garraway’s eyes as she realises that the pack may be turning on her.
This much dramatic irony is so tasty, it has to be bad for you.
The set-dressing and stage craft around this simple game of betrayal is the Stygian icing on the cake. Claudia’s funereal veils and riding boots, flickering braziers, gravestones carved with contestants’ names, orchestral sad-core pop covers and figures in hooded cloaks – it’s a Dan Brown page-turner come to life and it all ends on Halloween night, because of course it does.
I used to be a purist when The Traitors first began, insisting that the format wouldn’t work as well with professional performers or reality TV types. I struggled with the US version, which cast fame-hungry influencers and skipped the regular Joes altogether. The UK Traitors worked so much better because, I believed, only civilians in pursuit of the cash prize could really give the show the stakes it needed.
But how wrong I was. Celebrity Traitors, with its powerful mix of viewer superiority and gentle celebrity ambush might just be the defining TV format of our era.
Celebrity Traitors continues at 9pm Wednesdays and Thursdays on BBC One. Julia Raeside’s is an author and critic. Her debut novel Don't Make Me Laugh (Bedford Square) is shortlisted for the 2025 Comedy Women in Print prize