Celebrity Traitors had another corking episode last night, headlined by the exit of Jonathan Ross, the first Traitor to be banished from the show and seemingly the most powerful of the dastardly three (Alan Carr and Cat Burns being the other two).
Unsurprisingly for a man who dresses like The Cramps’ butler, Ross left with a flourish, saying, “I am and always have been a Faithful.... to the Traitors!”
At last the Faithful had a scalp, after failure upon failures at the roundtable. And ex-rugby player Joe Marler was proven right in his long-held suspicions over Ross. Marler had been cutting a frustrated figures over the last few episodes, as the Faithfuls repeatedly banished their own, including Stephen Fry, Mark Bonnar and Clare Balding. The competitor reared up in him as he became determined to seek a Traitor out, and tried to rally the others to eject Ross.
In the crazy cultural discourse that appears around massively watched event TV like this, one of the hot takes that seems to have emerged is that Marler is behaving like a bully.
Chiefly people are pointing at the way he had taken to staring out those who he suspected of being Traitors at the roundtable, Ross in particular but also Alan Carr, who had begun commenting about being unnerved by him.
This seems to have now sparked a bullying row and defence of poor Alan. Which is surely another case of Alan manipulating those on the other side of the screen too. Alan is a Traitor, one who, after initial nerves, has taken to it with aplomb, happily junking his (apparently now former) best friend Paloma Faith and expertly managing to evade suspicion and point fingers at Faithfuls with his combination of intelligence and faux-innocent class clown behaviour.
You can take his uncomfortableness under Marler’s stare with a pinch of salt. Carr will do anything to evade suspicion and reflect it back on the person who’s accusing him, cleverly painting himself as a victim here. Carr is no victim, he’s a Traitor! And a fine one...
But more to the point, what people seem to forget is that this is a game. Contestants are trying to figure things out, because some among their number are liars, and the beauty of the show is in seeing how difficult it is to detect when people are lying, and how easy it is for those with despicable agendas can spread false and nefarious information. It’s group behaviour laid out in an entertainment format... but while it plays deliciously with human behaviour under threat, it is a game show.
Marler is trying out old school sportsman eyeballing to see who will crack. Others are trying different ways. Celia Imrie is also suspicious of Carr and keeps giving him a hard stare too and a school teacherly “Is it you, Alan?” David Olusoga meanwhile, is trying to reason people nicely into revealing themselves.
What you can’t really do with this show is taking it in the wrong spirit. Remove the behaviour from its context and call people out for it. In a baffling hot take last week the author Elizabeth Day wrote on Substack that the white contestants were acting in a racist manner because Nico Omilana and Tameka Empson were the first to be banished. Her point was about unconscious white prejudice, and how the show should make white people question themselves since, as the show was ‘proving’, it was brown and black people put under suspicion first. A strange leap to a conclusion, which was then immediately undone in subsequent episodes where the banished have all been white. But why count like this? How reductive.
Part of the glory of programmes such as Traitors is seeing a diverse mix of contestants and seeing them play a game together. If you take part of the flailing around to find people to banish as microaggressions indicating prejudice, well there may be a shade of it if you really must look for it, but you’re missing the broader point. Everyone is on a level in the castle, everyone is mixed in, everyone messes up and occassionally they get it right.
To judge The Traitors as if it is a documentary is just asking for banishment.
