Warning: this review contains spoilers
Lord knows how Alan Carr will get through The Celebrity Traitors’ Round Table without going to pieces and yelling: “Oh, gawd. Yes, it’s me!”
Along with Jonathan Ross and Cat Burns, the comic and presenter has been chosen as one of this year’s initial “traitors”. Watching him vibrate with panic is highly entertaining and makes him the star of the first episode. Ross, who has packed a Val Doonican knit and a Top Gun flying suit in his suitcase, is in his element, while Burns, a neuro-divergent singer-songwriter with an air of calm, may go under the radar for some time.
Cat Burns, a neuro-divergent singer-songwriter, is also selected to be a Traitor – Euan Cherry/BBC/Studio Lambert
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This VIP version of the hit BBC One show is great fun. There are 19 celebrities, so even if some get on your wick, there will be others you like. I defy anyone to recognise all of them. If you’re au fait with Celia Imrie, you probably don’t know YouTube prankster Niko Omilana, and vice versa. Not being a rugby fan, I had never heard of Joe Marler, but he’s one of the funniest people here.
“If this was a party, you’d be really chuffed about who turned up,” comedian Lucy Beaumont says as she surveys her fellow contestants. And she’s broadly right, provided you’re a big fan of Stephen Fry and don’t mind Charlotte Church getting all woo-woo about becoming “intimate with the Earth”.
Jonathan Ross is clearly in his element when selected to be a Traitor by Claudia Winkleman (right) – Euan Cherry/BBC/Studio Lambert
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The format is unchanged from the original version of the show: the contestants are ferried to The Traitors castle in the picturesque Highlands, where three of them are secretly selected by host Claudia Winkleman to be traitors. They must carry out a “murder” each night without being detected, while the whole group also takes part in team challenges to boost the prize fund. The winner will win up to £100,000 for their chosen charity.
In the launch episode, at least, everyone behaves exactly as you would expect. Carr is hilarious. Former Olympic diver Tom Daley models his own knitwear. Historian David Olusoga talks very softly, while Fry seeks out the works of Shakespeare in the library and admires “the bibelots, the objets trouvés delicately placed on the shelves”. Big personalities stand out – singer Paloma Faith being one of them – while quieter players, such as actor Mark Bonnar, do not. But there are eight more episodes to go.
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Is it as good as the non-celebrity version? Not quite. On the other hand, the fakery involved in being a celebrity might turn some of this lot into elite-level traitors.
The producers don’t give them an easy ride. The first thing the contestants have to do is dig their own graves to win a shield protecting them from elimination. The opening mission, to get a Trojan horse up a hill, is physically tough. Sportsmen Marler and Daley, unsurprisingly, are good at it. Clare Balding takes charge and gives instructions in head girl fashion, only to make a blunder. The task also involves brain power, which is where Nick Mohammed, probably the only Ted Lasso star to have studied geophysics at Cambridge, comes into his own.
Blindfolded, the celebrities sit at the round table while Winkleman (bottom) selects the series’s villains – Euan Cherry/BBC/Studio Lambert
And the show is so well-made and well-edited that it is guaranteed to entertain. The episode really gets going at the end, when the traitors are given their first instructions. One of them must secretly “murder” a player by touching their face, without giving the game away. Ross and Burns entrust the task to Carr, even though Ross would be a far better bet. “I thought I wanted to be a traitor, but I have a sweating problem and I can’t keep a secret. What am I going to do?” Carr wails. I can’t wait to find out in episode two.
The Celebrity Traitors continues on BBC One, Thursday October 9 at 9pm. The first episode is on BBC iPlayer now
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