It was the first real day of 2026: 2 January. There was already no shortage of mayhem, which is to say “news”, in the world but the papers were united around one talking point: The Traitors has changed format and introduced a secret traitor. Looking at the coverage, you would not have been able to tell which tabloid you were reading; all were united in a single, harmonious, “Wow, can’t wait to see what happens”. Traitors-appreciation will brook no political division, no silos, no echo chambers; it is, genuinely – I’ve scraped all the available data in my head – the only enjoyable thing that no one has ever called “woke”. If the nation were a couple on the rocks, Traitors is the local Italian restaurant we would go to, to remember the good times, when garlic bread was still delicious and things were still funny. To say anything remotely critical about the format would just be needless, churlish – ought to be illegal, actually.
Except, guys, one day we’re going to have a conversation about how perilous it is to be a person of colour on this show, and if we’re ever going to do that, sooner is better than later.
Walk back through the early rounds of Celebrity Traitors: I’ve discredited myself on this subject, having predicted before it started that it wouldn’t work, because the contestants weren’t motivated by money and, being celebrities, they were all front to begin with. I was actually right, by the way – the lack of a cash incentive made them incalculably more stupid. They managed to banish five faithfuls before they found a traitor – not even in series one, when nobody really knew what they were doing, did a group come close to being so unsuccessful. I was wrong, though, to think that would make it any less compelling.
Anyway, first to be banished was Niko Omilana, the 27-year-old YouTuber, and well before his fateful round table, everyone stopped talking to him. It made absolutely no sense; this is a man of baffling personal charm. You cannot watch him without smiling. In the 2021 London mayoral election, he won nearly 50,000 votes on a promise of turning McDonald’s outlets into social housing. Regarding his banishment, he mused aloud that maybe it was because he was an outsider – everyone else had been around the same kind of showbiz traps for years, and his scene was much younger, altogether different. Well, maybe.
Second to be banished was Tameka Empson, the 48-year-old EastEnders actor and comedian, and who knows, she may have also suffered the curse of being a middle-aged woman. There seems to be some additional unconscious bias which means middle-aged women are considered annoying, and I hope I speak for all those of us in this demographic when I say: we are annoying on purpose. We are absolutely done with nonsense.
Whoosh, almost no time has passed, a fresh, non-celebrity cast has appeared, and once again, it seems to be a risky old business not being white, especially if you’re Ross. All early banishments are a throw of the dice, since nobody has done anything or knows anything, but this was ridiculous. The 37-year-old personal trainer was in the crosshairs for reacting, for not reacting, for knowing things, for not knowing things, for defending himself, for not defending himself. Thank God there was someone even more suspicious: Judy, whose smoking gun was her manner, which didn’t sit right. A child liaison officer by profession, aged 60, yes, she definitely has the manner of someone who is done with nonsense. But you can’t make any solid inferences of treachery from that, it turns out.
Traitors is still great; it’s still the charming little eatery of our collective psyche, and on no account should we stop going there. Nobody’s accusing anyone of conscious bias – but if the BBC revealed in 10 years’ time that it wasn’t a gameshow at all, it was actually a social-experiment documentary about unconscious bias, I’d think: yeah, well played, that really worked.
• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
