Alan Carr, heretofore known as a thoroughly pleasant individual, has spent The Celebrity Traitors flagrantly murdering his fellow contestants and sidestepping unwanted attention as much as someone who looks and sounds like Alan Carr reasonably can. He has undeniably been the breakout star of the show – but at what cost? Carr (jokingly?) revealed this week that he has fled to Florida after becoming “the most hated man in the UK”. His crimes? Mercilessly cutting off opportunities for Tom Daley to exhibit his collections of knits! Executing his good friend Paloma Faith and not even pretending to feel bad about it! Simply being too bloody good at all of this!
The funny thing, though, is that Carr actually isn’t very good at all of this, in the clearest sense of the word. But much like the chameleonic power of the “boring, laddie, straight Traitor from Slough” on the regular Traitors, “loud, campy gay Traitor” has its own strange transmogrifying effects on the celebrity edition: Carr’s nervous giggles become nothing but nervous giggles; his excessive sweating a mere bodily issue; his winking evilness just a bit of knowing humour. Somehow he just endlessly gets away with it.
In fairness, Carr seemed to anticipate this from the start. He told Claudia Winkleman in episode one that he indeed wanted to be a Traitor, even after being asked whether he’d be comfortable stabbing his fellow contestants in the back. “They’d do it to me, they’re showbiz people!” he retorted.
He seemed to know and understand the show’s rhythms, and its in-built silliness. “This was a classic Traitors mission,” he said early on. “Teamwork; a massive horse; a slight tenuous link to history that no one really understands.” And his murder of Faith, who is reportedly a real-life friend, cemented him as somebody who truly sees the show as a game and not something to be taken enormously seriously.
There were early signs that he was just too erratic to avoid suspicion for long (remember how he winked at fellow Traitor Jonathan Ross, then plotted REALLY REALLY LOUDLY with Cat Burns?), but this proved misplaced. Over the course of the series, Carr has deftly engineered suspicion of entirely innocent people, notably the actor Mark Bonnar, and been prepared to throw his fellow Traitors under the bus – when numerous Faithfuls got wind of Ross being up to no good, Carr was more than happy to turn on him. He admitted to Burns that he would have voted Ross out if it came to it.
Going into the show’s final week, Carr’s luck may have run its course, however. Last week saw rugby player Joe Marler, the show’s sole Hercule Poirot figure, privately plot to unmask the Traitors as both Carr and Burns – a plan strengthened when Celia Imrie, the only other Faithful who seemed to have rumbled the pair, was offed in a midnight slaying.
A cynical viewer may interpret this last-minute threat – after weeks of Carr more or less carrying a neon sign around his neck reading “Traitor” – to be a producer-led invention. How on earth did no one point the finger at him sooner? At the same time, can you really blame the show if it wanted to keep him around? Carr has been a comic delight throughout the series, working fully in tandem with the arch melodrama of the show as a whole. Most hated man in the UK? Only if we’re a nation of humourless scolds, frankly. And something tells me we’re not – if only for two hours of BBC primetime each week.
