Star Spinoff Was Best Reality TV of Year

SPOILER ALERT: This article contains spoilers for the season finale of “The Celebrity Traitors U.K.,” now streaming on BBC iPlayer.

It is rare for the most popular show on television to be one of the best. It is rarer for that television show to become such a public spectacle that screenings of its finale fill out bars and clubs across the country. And it is even rarer for the tensions during those screenings, which you could cut with a knife, to be caused by the comedian Alan Carr.

Yet “The Celebrity Traitors U.K.” did just that. The BBC’s first season of a celebrity version of the game — an elaborate, unpredictable internationally-franchised whodunnit — not only matched expectations. It exceeded them. 

Celebrity formats are usually there to extend the ongoing popularity of an existing show, rather than necessarily add to it. The reason why it worked here was that the celebrities were clearly fans of the show and had their own strategy to begin with. “Celebrity Traitors,” made by reality television powerhouse Studio Lambert, didn’t buckle by adjusting the format to cater for them either, resulting in great gameplay but also surreal moments, such as the first episode where the celebrities were digging their own graves with great enthusiasm.

If you’re reading this piece from the U.S., you might be wondering why there’s been such a fuss over the British version when the U.S. “Traitors” has had celebrities from the very beginning. It’s simple: in the U.K., none of the celebrities had become famous from appearing in other reality shows. There were no exaggerated personas or people trying to hog the cameras on the roundtables.

And whilst some names like Sir Stephen Fry were shielded from early banishment or murder because of their celebrity status, resulting in the premature departure of actress Ruth Codd and YouTube prankster Niko Omilana, the gameplay never sank into celebrities needlessly protecting each other because they were mates. Thank God.

So, what made this show so special, at a time when reality television is already so saturated? Read on to find out…

The celebrities were… terrible.

But let’s not kid ourselves here. Until they stepped it up in the final few episodes, and finally banished Traitor host Jonathan Ross, the celebrities were completely hopeless.

Celebrities aren’t smarter than the rest of us, but sometimes their elevated status, treatment and constant attention can fool you into thinking they are. Here, the celebrities banished a Faithful at the roundtables five consecutive times. Five! At one point, nearly 40% of the remaining contestants were Traitors, which was worse than any British iteration of the show to date. Like Carr, if I were one of the producers I would have likely turned to drinking double rosés, in the unthinkable and unprecedented event that the Faithfuls were so bad there were none of them actually left three episodes before the ending.

It was a tonic to see them being rubbish, and it wasn’t just at the roundtables either. Clare Balding, a respected broadcaster who has hundreds of hours of hosting Olympic and Paralympics coverage under her belt, messed up a mission for everyone within seconds because she didn’t understand the basic written instructions. Later, when “Bridget Jones” actress Celia Imrie was murdered in plain sight, journalist Kate Garraway assumed it might have been down to who had sun-dried tomatoes at dinner. Delightful.

The most ridiculous and failed accusation of the series, without a doubt, was when Olympian Tom Daley accused Garraway of being a Traitor after she said the word “flabbergasting” following singer and actress Paloma Faith’s funeral (that was a sentence I never thought I would write in my career, but we are where we are.)

“’Flabbergasting,’ who says such a word?” said a confident Agatha Christie, I mean Tom.

“You can’t say that someone is a Traitor because they have got a better vocabulary than you,” Carr responded.

The Fart Heard Around the U.K.

Though Carr also delivered some of the best lines of the season — such as when Jonathan Ross wore what looked like a “Flintstones” outfit and Carr responded “yabba dabba don’t” — it was Imrie who became the nation’s favorite. E

ven though she had collaborated with Victoria Wood for years, her comic timing and deadpan delivery was a surprising delight. Before this series, who would have thought that Imrie farting would be the best TV moment of the whole year? But it was. 

In fact, as the BAFTA Television Awards now have a TV Moment of the Year award, there’s a good chance that Imrie farting could actually win it. Just imagine… I would like to thank the Academy *parps*.

Alan Carr, the accidental serial killer

Making Carr a Traitor was an inspired choice. After hopelessly trying to accuse Balding and Imrie of being Traitors, causing him to say “I am worse than Linda,” quoting the worst civilian Traitor of all time, the true joy was seeing Carr become an accidental serial killer who then got addicted to the bloodlust.

He sailed through roundtables even when he forgot that he had a shield. He even corpsed in the penultimate episode when he was asked to stare at the other celebrities and tell them that he was a Faithful. 

Yet bizarrely, Alan being perceived as a bad Traitor was his greatest strength. It put everyone off the scent. Then, when fellow Traitor Cat Burns started to get bogged down in guilt, Carr merely reacted to the murder of Daley with: “He’s dead. Deal with it.” 

It all came to an emotional climax during Thursday night’s finale. Carr, revealing that he was a Traitor after successfully convincing fellow finalists historian David Olusoga and “Ted Lesso” actor Nick Mohammed that he was a Faithful, unexpectedly buckled under guilt after winning the show and burst into tears. He apologized and said the secret had been “tearing me apart,” resulting in Mohammed, Olusoga and host Claudia Winkleman consoling him and reminding him of the amount of money he had fundraised for his chosen charity. 

In a moment where most winners become the villain, Carr instead became a national treasure.

And the fact that the greatest moment of television this year was watched by the most viewers, 11 million, according to early figures? Even better.