There’s a wild and weepy ending to Celebrity Traitors (BBC One, 9pm) as Alan Carr fibs his way to victory and then dissolves into tears when it is revealed he’s been speaking with a forked tongue for the past four weeks.
“What a rollercoaster. I had no poker face,” he gasps. “And here I am, the winner. To lie bluntly to people’s faces was tough.”
But when the going gets tough, the tough get rough. That, at least, is the attitude adopted by Carr as he watches comedian Nick Mohammed turn on his bestie – rugby player Joe Marler – at the last hurdle.
The tension is almost as thick as Claudia Winkleman’s fringe when Nick reads too much into Joe saying “sorry” after he banished the (guilty) Cat Burns at the round table halfway through the final.
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Following his gut when his gut is flat-out wrong, Nick ditched Joe – and essentially handed victory to Alan.
This first Celebrity Traitors series was a shot in the dark for the BBC, which risked meddling with a winning formula. The fear was that, with the celebs vying for a charity prize fund rather than cold, hard cash, the stakes would be significantly lowered. Plus, famous people are as two-faced as they come. Surely they’d all be walking, squawking lie detectors – capable of sniffing out a conspirator in a green cape half a mile away?
That proved not to be the case and Celebrity Traitors was just as absorbing as the regular version of the show, though it obviously lacked the Paudie “Paudfather” Moloney factor of Traitors Ireland. Otherwise this was gory good fun, as the faithful blundered about in the dark night after night – barking up the wrong tree and looking straight past the traitors standing right in front of them.
The final is a thriller worthy of the rest of the series – at least for those who avoided all the spoilers floating around the internet after the episode was accidentally leaked 24 hours early by a streamer in Canada.
Yet amid all the ups and downs, perhaps the biggest shock is how heavily the burden of traitordom had weighed on poor Alan.
After revealing he’s a traitor Carr then falls into wracking sobs, requiring the surviving faithful, Nick, and historian David Olusoga, to rally around. “You’ve done brilliantly,” says Nick, after recovering from the shock that made him look like he was about to spontaneously combust. “Think of the charity.”
Still, once the excitement has faded away, Carr will surely be pleased with himself.
Despite looking guilty as anything from the opening episode, Carr has fooled some of the greatest minds and biggest egos in Britain – and given a fascinating season, the gripping finale it deserved. And that’s no word of a lie.
