I’ve just finished watching the second series of The Celebrity Traitors, and I can’t help feeling a bit underwhelmed. I love the show, but with each new series the holes in the game itself get bigger to me in comparison to the entertainment value it provides.
There were certainly some entertaining moments. Watching Romesh Ranganathan accuse James Blunt of being a traitor, only for Blunt to pull faces suggesting he’d been accused of being a war criminal, was great TV. Sadly, the producers did not give us an entertaining moment of James Acaster voting for himself at the round table.
But the more I watch The Traitors (celebrity or civilian), the more I wonder whether the programme has a rather fundamental problem.
Strip away the celebrity personalities, Claudia Winkleman’s fringe and the Scottish castle, is there actually a very good game underneath?
While Claudia treads the line between ‘this is all very serious’ and ‘we’re just messing about on telly’ perfectly, I’m increasingly unconvinced that the game itself works.
Why bother catching a traitor?
The fundamental premise of the programme is straightforward – a group of faithful contestants must identify and banish the traitors hiding among them.
Except there’s a rather enormous flaw. When the faithful successfully identify a traitor early in the competition, the remaining traitors can simply be given an opportunity to recruit a replacement.
This happened twice in the latest series. Richard E. Grant was banished and Hannah Fry became a traitor. When Fry was subsequently banished and Ross Kemp reacted like he’d scored the winning goal in the FA Cup final, King Kenny was recruited ten minutes later.
The faithful had successfully identified two traitors, but there were still three traitors sitting around the breakfast table. Worse still, the newly recruited traitors had previously been genuine faithfuls.
Suppose I spent the opening three episodes carefully observing somebody. I concluded, correctly, that they were a faithful. They behaved exactly as I would expect a faithful to behave, and there was nothing suspicious about them. Then, overnight, they were recruited. Every piece of evidence I’d collected about their innocence had become practically worthless.
Imagine if, during the first round table, the Leader of the Faithful (Michael Sheen) had said:
‘Listen up, everyone. I’m as sure as sure can be that Richard E. Grant is a traitor. But I’m not going to vote for him. We all know that there is going to be at least one traitor entering the final episode (that has never not been the case in a UK series of the programme) – so almost everything we faithful do between now and then is completely futile. Let’s find the other traitors completely at random, and whoever the group of faithfuls are in the final episode, just vote Richard off then’.
Would Michael have been held up as the sort of genius not seen since Albert Einstein roamed the earth? Of course not, he would be treated with the same level of suspicion as Adolf Hitler when he said he wasn’t eyeing up Poland – and, in all likelihood, Michael would be edited out of the programme by the producers and immediately banished.
Recruitment is necessary to prevent the faithful from winning the programme halfway through the series – you can’t sign a contract for ten episodes and deliver six. But it also makes identifying traitors in the opening episodes a rather pointless exercise.
You could argue that banishing Richard E. Grant actually left the faithful worse off. They successfully identified a traitor, only for him to be replaced by someone who, unlike Grant, didn’t feel the need to tell everyone they were a traitor under the gentlest of questioning.
Recruitment isn’t guaranteed indefinitely, and eliminating a traitor might still be useful. But the supposed triumph of uncovering one becomes substantially less impressive when the producers can simply arrange for someone else to take their place.
The best strategy is to do almost nothing
Imagine you’re a faithful – you want to win, and you understand the rules perfectly. What’s your best strategy? It certainly isn’t to spend your first few days loudly identifying everyone you suspect of being a traitor.
Suppose you’re exceptionally clever (a Hannah Fry type). You’ve spotted an inconsistency in somebody’s behaviour that suggests they have been recruited, correctly concluded that they’re a traitor and persuaded half the group to agree with you.
Congratulations – you’re now probably one of the first people the traitors will consider murdering. The cleverer you appear, the more dangerous you become.
On the other hand, if you say absolutely nothing and make no effort to participate, the other faithful might decide you’re behaving suspiciously and banish you themselves.
The optimal strategy is therefore rather obvious. Be friendly, get involved in the conversations, express the occasional suspicion without being too forceful. But never ever look like the most intelligent person in the room.
Above all, don’t make yourself a threat to the traitors.
In the opening episodes, your primary objective should be simply to survive. There will be plenty of time to identify traitors when the final approaches and the opportunities for recruitment have disappeared.
Towards the end you get some of the faithful parroting ‘I just don’t know why I’m still here…’. The answer? You’re inoffensive (so you’ve not been banished) and you’re probably a bit thick (so you’ve not been murdered).
The programme supposedly rewards brilliant detective work. In reality, it may reward people who are sufficiently unremarkable to be left alone. That’s a fairly serious flaw in a game built around identifying deception.
Why is everyone obsessed with trustworthiness?
Time after time, someone announces that they don’t trust another contestant. Perhaps they’re evasive, perhaps they haven’t been sufficiently open with the group, or perhaps they just don’t seem like a particularly trustworthy person.
But what on earth has somebody’s general trustworthiness got to do with whether they’re a traitor?
The traitors aren’t selected by Claudia Winkleman after a careful examination of everyone’s moral character. They’re assigned the role by the production team.
The nicest, most honest person in the castle might have been selected as a traitor. The most unpleasant, dishonest person might be a faithful. Their personalities have nothing necessarily to do with it.
Of course, there might be clues in how somebody behaves once they’ve been selected. People can become uncomfortable when lying, and inconsistencies in their stories might reveal something. But so much of the discussion amounts to little more than contestants deciding whether they like or trust someone, and the more confident they become about their conclusions, the more absurd the whole exercise seems.
And then there are the tasks
A substantial proportion of each episode is devoted to elaborate challenges. Contestants must retrieve objects, complete physical challenges or undertake some other complicated activity, usually while Claudia looks on rather ominously, shouting ‘RUUUUNNNNN!!’.
I feel like many of us reach for our phones for a little scroll during each task. Even the celebs know they are faintly ridiculous – see Romesh’s reaction to the absurdities coming out of Claudia’s mouth when she explained one of the tasks.
I appreciate that the tasks help build the prize fund. But as a viewer, I struggle to care.
Each time Claudia exclaims ‘you’ve added £3,000 to the prize pot!!’, I immediately think ‘James Blunt wouldn’t get out of bed for £3,000…’.
Wouldn’t Romesh raise more money for his charity by spending two weeks doing gigs and donating the profits, rather than spending two weeks at a Scottish castle hoping to win a share of the prize pot?
The group challenges generally tell us very little about who the traitors are. The traitors should be given competing objectives. Force them to make decisions that might subsequently provide genuine evidence of deception.
Instead, we spend twenty minutes watching everyone work towards essentially the same objective, before returning to the castle for another round of entirely speculative accusations. The tasks and the detective game often feel like two unrelated television programmes stitched together.
Brilliant television, terrible game?
Watching famous people accuse one another of dishonesty, betray their friends (remember Alan Carr and Paloma Faith?) and become genuinely offended when someone questions their integrity can be tremendous fun.
But there’s a difference between entertaining television and a genuinely compelling game. A good game creates jeopardy because the participants’ decisions matter, their strategies can be assessed and success generally reflects some combination of skill and luck.
In The Traitors, the relationship between making sensible decisions and winning seems considerably more tenuous. In Friday’s final, Romesh Ranganathan and Sebastian Croft emerged victorious after correctly banishing King Kenny, the last remaining traitor.
Did Romesh win because he is the real life incarnation of Sherlock Holmes? No, but he played the game perfectly in that he didn’t get murdered or banished early on.
The Traitors can produce excellent television, particularly when its contestants are amusing enough to make an otherwise pointless argument entertaining. But I’m not convinced it produces a particularly good game. Once you realise that the most sensible strategy for a faithful might be to avoid doing very much at all until the final few episodes, it’s rather difficult to take all that early Poundshop Poirot work seriously.
But will I watch every second of the next civilian series? Absolutely.
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