Oh Alan. He who gamely asked Claudia if he could be a Traitor in the first round of interviews, but then, once granted Traitordom, broke into the first of many sweats and began life in the castle under the burden of guilt, lying and the constant possibility of being given away by his own “nerves”.
Alan Carr is just too nice to be a Traitor, which of course should make him an excellent Traitor, if only those nerves weren’t getting the better of him. In the second episode of what is clearly going to be a classic series, with an excellent line-up of big characters, a great deal of the laughs are still coming from watching Carr squirm under his evil responsibilities.
Pushed to the front by his fellow Traitors, Jonathan Ross and Cat Burns, Carr had the task of killing one of the Faithful in plain sight. To do this, he had to rub his hands on a poison plant and then touch the face of one of the celebrities, without giving himself away.
The shocking reveal that began this episode was that his victim was his best mate in the castle, Paloma Faith. After fretting over how he might possibly touch someone’s face, he achieved it with the old, “you have some hair stuck to your face,” bit of attentive styling, which of course is far from unusual for any pop star. They have teams of people doing that for them every day. Poor Paloma, the first celebrity to go, but what a way to do it...
What’s been notable in this series is how the Gothic drama has been dialled up another notch. Claudia Winkleman is not dressing and acting like she’s fronting The Sisters of Mercy. For the reveal of Faith’s demise, all the celebrities were forced to walk in a funeral procession behind Winkleman in full mourning dress atop a horse and carriage carrying three coffins. Their destination was a graveyard where the celebs had dug their own holes the day before. They genuinely looked terrified.
A game followed in which they had to guess which celebrities had to lie in the coffins through a set of clues. Niko Omilana – a prankster YouTuber who is already starting to wobble – and comedian Lucy Beaumont were selected along with Faith, until Winkleman theatrically closed the lid on the gerbil-like singer.
As they all made their way back to the castle, Carr was consoled by many of the celebs, and in his talking head he congratulated himself on having got away with the murder to such a degree that he had actually gained sympathy.
But of course, as only clever Clare Balding noted, since Carr was the least likely to kill Faith, that actually made him the most likely. It was the perfect cover. And here we have the reason why Traitors is so compelling and funny. It’s the double-bluffs, the triple-bluffs and the quadruple bluffs that are continually playing out. And for the Traitors it’s surprising how easy it is to convince people that there’s just good old fashioned single bluffs occurring.
As Stephen Fry – further consolidating himself on the show as the wisest, kindest man on earth – so sagely pointed out in episode one, nobody can really tell when someone else is lying so any talk of “gut instinct” is nonsense.
Yet this is what most of the Faithful always do. Spend half the time checking out each other’s body language and reactions to events, looking for tells. But of course scrutinise anyone and you’ll find suspicious behaviour. And if you have an ally scrutinising that person too, and agreeing with you, then soon you have proper demonisation taking place, a groupthink identifying of another. The social media metaphor is strong in this show, in round tables — like poor innocent Niko who may well be on his way out in the next episodes - once a bad apple is identified, they are swiftly cancelled. But it’s also horribly revealing about how humans work in general. Rounding suddenly on someone who is weak, who’s behaviour isn’t correct, who may be a wrong ‘un in the group.
This is why Faithfuls who are mistakenly identified as potential Traitors become genuinely upset. And are powerless to stop it. Of course it’s all a game, but it touches on a human’s worst nightmare: to be identified as a fake and thrown out of a social group. It hurts. And it makes it all highly watchable.
At one stage Joe Wilkinson – very good value and a potential winner as his manner is so matter-of-fact you believe anything he says – calls himself a “sheep”. And this is how they all start to act.
In the exciting round table, again Fry tried to bring it back to facts and data, when the likes of Tom Daley are obsessed with the way others are acting. Daley is coming across well, as a leader and a smart cookie, but he’s directing his brains in the wrong direction. Niko’s acting weird, therefore it must be him. Niko is acting weird because you’ve started watching him the whole time.
In the pressure of the room, they forget the facts! Mark Bonnar almost got there, thinking about how someone might be killed in plain sight, some kind of gesture perhaps? And Fry was about one blink away from seeing that if Carr was closest to Faith, then wouldn’t he have the most opportunities to do some kind of gesture towards her?
Instead, as the end of the roundtable approached before the episode ended, it was Niko with the most votes alongside Kate Garraway. Garraway was under suspicion by Daley and Tameka Empson because her reactions to Faith’s death were over-the-top. “I’m an old ham!” Garraway memorably protested. But it may not be enough to save her.
And indeed what hope do the Faithful have so long as they remain obsessed with gut instincts over the way people are acting instead of facts? The irony is though, that Alan Carr is actually giving it all away by the way he’s acting. It’s the sweating, the nerves, and now the winks - Ross was exasperated to see Carr winking at him after he had just murdered Faith: “I’m going to have to have a word with him,” muttered the expertly villainous presenter. Cat Burns had to repeatedly tell Carr off for talking too loud as well. “What are we going to do?” he said to her at one stage, in a roomful of people.
Surely Carr can’t last for long. Two more episodes, max. But when he goes, it’s going to be devastating, you’d be happy being buried alive with this man.
When is the next episode of The Celebrity Traitors?
The Celebrity Traitors is back on BBC One on Wednesday. All episodes are on the iPlayer
Celebrity Traitors episode dates
- Wednesday 8 October — Episode 1
- Thursday 9 October — Episode 2
- Wednesday 15 October — Episode 3
- Thursday 16 October — Episode 4
- Wednesday 22 October — Episode 5
- Thursday 23 October — Episode 6
- Wednesday 29 October — Episode 7
- Thursday 30 October — Episode 8
- Friday 31 October — Episode 9 (finale)
