“It’s all starting to feel a bit real,” the singer Cat Burns confided to millions of viewers last week. “We actually have murdered someone.”
If only. While few of us would want to do away with Celia Imrie or Stephen Fry, the ghastly Celebrity Traitors has one redeeming feature. It turns out that, for the most part, actors and comedians are just as insufferable as the normies who are usually condemned to a week’s scrutiny in a Scottish castle.
You can admire the obnoxious deviousness of Burns’s fellow traitors Jonathan Ross and Alan Carr. You can sympathise with the wide-eyed stupefaction of Lucy Beaumont, the tiresome angst of Mark Bonnar or the fact that David Olusoga is clearly bored out of his mind. But four episodes in, the viewer is tempted to ask: Which of these idiots would I kill off first?
And that’s the problem. In Traitors, death is not death. It can’t be, of course: and judging by the presence of a psychotherapist listed in the credits, the players are having enough trouble dealing with the fact that two of their number are driven away from the castle every night.
“Oh God! I voted to banish her! What the hell have I done?” Mate. She’s back at home, booking a Botox top-up and chatting with her agent about how high she can hike her after-dinner speech fees.
For the purposes of the game, of course, we must suspend our disbelief. Lovely Paloma Faith is the first to go, mercilessly poisoned by Carr – he had to manhandle a fake pot plant and then contrive to touch her face. Richard Osman probably won’t be borrowing that one.
But for Faith, only a performative death will do. First, she must lie in a coffin and stare up in horror, mascara fluttering, as Claudia Winkleman slams the lid shut. Then grave-diggers lower her into the ground, before Winkleman tosses in the flower that killed her and saunters away triumphantly.
It’s all as camp as Carr himself, of course. Just like the trashy paintings of Death hanging in the castle and the skulls loitering everywhere. Celebrity Traitors is obsessed with the memento mori, precisely because death is constantly invoked but never real.
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Skeletons and images of decay forced our ancestors to confront the terrifying fact of their own mortality. Now, it reminds the contestants that TV is harsh on the ageing celebrity, particularly when their hair gets wet in a challenge.
Never mind that Winkleman forces the celebrities to dig their own graves, and let’s hope no one remembers that people have been made to do that before in less amusing circumstances. Not tasteless enough for you? Let’s mock up a funeral procession, with the women dripping with sexy crucifixes and Tom Daley’s black shirt unbuttoned to his navel.
Occasionally, you suspect that Fry finds something distasteful about this orgy of kitschy death. But like the trooper he is, he scrunches his face into a resigned grimace and gets on with it.
Justifying the elaborate pointlessness of the challenges is harder, particularly when they involve some very mildly titillating S&M (the celebs are chained up and led about by robed figures wearing masks). Winkleman bribes them with money for the charity pot. Luckily, they always succeed magnificently, and just in time. Does the countdown timer on our screens bear any relation to reality? Who cares? Charity always wins.
There is a lot of lying, and not just from the traitors. “When we walked into this cabin, we were all genuinely scared,” shudders a Faithful, oblivious to the TV crew surrounding a garden shed fitted with sprinklers. Once inside, Imrie farts, and the horror of the moment exceeds anything else the production team can inflict.
Still, it is always fun to remember how humans behave when they are without their mobile phones, and reassuring that the answer is: just as badly. If the motto of Celebrity Traitors is “Which of you lying bastards is lying to me most often?”, then at least we have the satisfaction of knowing that they deceive each other even better than they do us.
What is really killing Celebrity Traitors, though, is that the stakes are so tediously low. These people are already famous. With a £40,000 flat fee for each player, no one is going to feel especially hard done by when they’re kicked out early.
The original Traitors could be a route to minor celebrity. Be sufficiently vile or brave, and the audience would follow you out of the castle and on to Instagram. Now the banishments are timid. No one wants to be hated.
“I’m so sorry,” the celebs whimper as they condemn another Faithful. “It’s because you’d make such a clever Traitor.” It makes you long for blood on the floor. But nowadays, in the run-up to Halloween, you can buy that stuff for three quid at Superdrug.
Ros Taylor hosts the Oh God, What Now?, Jam Tomorrow and Bunker podcasts
