3 hours ago
5
The Celebrity Traitors ★★★★
It was the fart that broke the internet. Well, in England, anyway, when acclaimed 73-year-old British actor Celia Imrie let out a nervous squeak on The Celebrity Traitors and promptly cemented her place in the reality TV hall of fame.
Celia Imrie and Alan Carr are stealing the show on The Celebrity Traitors.
“I’m so sorry, it’s nerves – but I always own up,” said Imrie when the show’s host, the formidable Claudia Winkleman, asked what the noise was.
Next to her, comedian Alan Carr collapsed into a fit of giggles.
If you are rolling your eyes and bemoaning the state of television – reality! Celebrities! The end of civilisation! – The Traitors could change your mind. Yes, it is reality and this version is stuffed with celebrities, but it’s also a delightful bit of nonsense that reveals more about the human condition than any deeply serious – and deeply depressing – bit of true crime ever could.
“Players never really seem to get their head around the fact that trustworthiness, and whether somebody’s a traitor, are completely unrelated,” psychologist Clea Wright told The Guardian. “If they decide they trust someone, they decide that person can’t be a traitor – logic deserts people.”
Lucy Beaumont (left), Joe Marler, Cat Burns, and Jonathan Ross on The Celebrity Traitors.
It reveals how, deep down, most us are susceptible to group-think and tend to favour people who are like us. It lays bare the depths many would sink to win the prize and the deceit they happily engage in to trick their fellow players. It is a masterclass in manipulation – and it’s very, very watchable.
Just ask the Brits. When The Celebrity Traitors premiered on the BBC a couple of weeks ago, it was to an astonishing audience of more than 11 million viewers. They were hooked on the roster of 19 big names, including Carr, Imrie, Stephen Fry, Jonathan Ross, singers Cat Burns, Paloma Faith and Charlotte Church, actors Nick Mohammed and Mark Bonnar and Olympic diver Tom Daley.
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The gameplay is reasonably simple: three traitors are chosen (Carr, Ross and Burns) and they must “murder” the faithful without being detected. The contestants also participate in a group activity each day, which can add to the final tally of prizemoney. Each night, the contestants meet in an attempt to flush out a traitor (which is where perceived biases, group think and sometimes even bullying comes into play). The game ends when either all traitors have been banished, and then the faithfuls share the prizemoney, or when all the faithfuls have been eliminated and only the traitors remain.
Like the celebrity version of any well-known format, it works because everyone involved knows how to entertain – they are acutely aware of the audience – and because they are either subverting everything we knew about them (who knew Mohammed, who played Nathan Shelley on Ted Lasso, was a polymath with a thing for puzzles) or confirming they are as much of a twit as we suspected (not naming names, but I’m looking at you, flyboy).
At the time of writing, the three traitors remained untouched. My money is on Carr and Burns to make it to the end, with his ridiculousness and her coolness making for a winning combination.
However, the real interest lies in what comes after. Ten has been promoting the series pretty hard, streaming it on 10Play and screening it twice a week on the main free-to-air channel. It’s a bold play to re-build interest in the format that Ten mothballed in 2023 after only two seasons (interestingly, the second season was wildly popular in the UK).
Rodger Corser hosted the first two seasons of The Traitors in Australia. He has now been replaced by Gretel Killeen.
It starts again next year, with Gretel Killeen taking over from Rodger Corser as host, and a group of contestants that qualify as “celebrities”: Ian “Dicko” Dickinson, Kirby and AJ from Australian Survivor, plus a gaggle of former Real Housewives, MasterChef Australia, Big Brother and Bachelor contestants and Olympic legend Shane Gould.
Whether Australian audiences stay faithful to the revived format, or stab it in the back, remains to be seen.
The Celebrity Traitors is streaming on 10Play and airs on Wednesdays at 7.30pm and Thursdays at 8.30pm on Ten.
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