It’s one of the most iconic parts of the whole show: contestants, gathered around an ornate wooden table, ready to decide who might be a Faithful and who might be in danger of being banished.
On the screen, they’re nice and short: 5 minutes, followed by a decisive banishing. But as ever on the show, the answer is far from straightforward.
“I can't tell you the exact length, but they are long and they are laborious and they are stressful,” Paul Gorton tells us. “If you've not found a traitor for a certain period of time they are painful. And as a traitor you want it to be over as soon as possible.”
Speaking on behalf of WhichBingo, the former contestant added that he would “stare at Claudia and I'd be like, ‘Come on Claudia, we're done,’ until she’d say ‘Your time for talk is over.’ And when she did that, you could have a lovely little exhalation because you’d think, ‘Oh OK, I've another night here.’”
Gorton, a business manager from Manchester, was a Traitor during the show’s second season, before being ignominiously voted out at the eighth episode – the same year that fellow Traitors Harry Clark went onto win.
In 2024, Gorton did talk about how tough he found the show, despite going in with the clear aim of being made a Traitor. “It lasted for eight episodes and I was deteriorating," he told BBC Breakfast. "For the past couple [of episodes], I started getting more emotional. My brain started kind of working in overload and I just thought 'I'm done here'.
“I think Harry probably might have felt that as well and thought 'I'm gonna dip in here and get Paul out'.”
Despite that, he tells us the roundtables were a highlight of his Traitors experience. “It's a long time and they are they're painful, but it was my favourite bit of my time on the show,” he says.
“I prefer the round tables than any of the games, any of the daytime bits. I loved the proper meat of it, getting to the table and experiencing that stress and I loved how close I could take it to the line without getting caught.”
In addition to reminiscing, Gorton has been watching this season of Celebrity Traitors.
“I had high hopes for it, and it's exceeded the high hopes,” he says. “I think it is the funniest Traitors season that that's ever been. With Alan Carr and Celia Imrie, it's exceptionally funny.”
“It's going to go from fun to stressful quite quick, if they don't find a traitor. I think that humour's going to fall away quite rapidly.”
“I think Alan and Jonathan are dangerously close to being caught, especially Jonathan. I do think Jonathan will betray Alan. I don't think the Faithfuls are anywhere near catching him but I think Jonathan has to steer them to Alan and throw Alan under the bus to protect himself because at the moment he is the weakest Traitor.” Tactics to adopt?
The Celebrity Traitors is streaming now on BBC One and iPlayer
