Towards the end of the most recent episode of the BBC’s fantastic first season of Celebrity Traitors, rugby player Joe Marler fixed a withering glare at Jonathan Ross and looked as if he was preparing to drop-kick him over the battlements of Ardross Castle in the Scottish Highlands. He was frustrated because it was plain to him that Ross was one of the three traitors hidden in their midst – while his fellow celebs bumbled on regardless, unable to see the back-stabber concealed in plain sight. Marler couldn’t understand it. How could so many overachievers be so useless at weeding out the saboteur seated right in front of them?
Viewers at home will have had much the same reaction as the celebrity faithful – including Stephen Fry, Kate Garraway, Charlotte Church, Nick Mohammed and Celia Imrie – blunder about, unable to flush out even a single traitor. Since this special edition of the blockbuster social deduction series launched three weeks ago, the faithful haven’t just barked up the wrong tree. They’ve wandered into the entirely wrong forest, unable to twig that Ross, his visibly sweating and shifty fellow television presenter Alan Carr and singer Cat Burns are the guilty parties. You could almost see the smoke rising from Marler’s nostrils as he wondered at their lack of street smarts.
If ever you wanted a reminder that even mildly famous people are nothing like the rest of us, then Celebrity Traitors has proved it, with scary tassels attached. Whether it’s official clever clogs Stephen Fry (the latest to be voted out) or telly historian David Olusoga – not an individual short of brain cells surely – the BBC’s crop of A-lister faithful appear to lack even the most basic tools needed to ferret out people who might be plotting against them.
On the face of it, that should be extraordinary, considering that becoming famous means scaling a treacherous, greasy pole of overachievement. There is space at the top for only so many household names, meaning that the celebs we meet on The Traitors will have had to fight to get where they are. Ah, but what happens once they reach that promised land? The answer, we may conclude from Celebrity Traitors, is that they are surrounded by glad-handers and wellwishers. There is no reason for suspicion. The blinding bright light of their fame lights their path wherever they venture.
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Curiously, presenter Claudia Winkleman was aware of these pitfalls when she introduced the players to the game back in episode one. “One of the skills you need to be good at in this game is to know when somebody is lying to you,” she said. “You are famous. People lie to you all the time… How on Earth are you going to tell when someone is lying to you?”
Tellingly, too, the first faithful to suspect Ross was Irish actor Ruth Codd, herself not famous by any traditional metric. Before the pandemic, she was, in fact, a hairdresser in Wexford town. She has, in other words, lived much the same life as the rest of us, where nobody assures you that you are fabulous and you have to worry about making your rent and petrol money. She was a normal person parachuted into a celebrity world, and goodness, could you tell.
The other significant feature of the season has been the degree of groupthink. From the moment the celebs all piled in on YouTuber Niko Omilana for no reason whatsoever in the first week, there has been a telling pattern of them all following each other over the brink, like lemmings with a good publicist.
It tells us a lot about the kiss-kiss world of the ultra-luvvy, where everyone has the same opinion about everything and nobody ever, ever expresses an awkward viewpoint (lest they be cancelled). Celebrities have learned to thrive by aligning with what other famous people do and think. Such a strategy has served them well in the outside world. It also means that, when it comes to spotting vandals and villains, they’re all kinds of useless.
Celebrity Traitors continues on BBC One on Wednesday and Thursday at 9pm
