Clare Balding said she would have “ruined” Celebrity Traitors if people listened to her early suspicions of Alan Carr.
Carr proved an incredibly successful contestant on last year’s hit celebrity version of the BBC game show, as he was chosen to be a Traitor in the show’s first episode but managed to evade suspicion throughout the contest – all while killing off his fellow stars. He ultimately proved victorious, winning the season in a nail-biting final episode.
While appearing at the annual Hay Festival today (26 May), sports presenter Clare Balding said she was one of the few contestants on the show to suspect Carr of being a Traitor – but absolutely no one listened to her.
“I hated the roundtable,” she said during a panel, of the setting for each Traitors episode’s climactic face-off between the show’s contestants. “Until I thought I was onto something,” she added.
Clare Balding at the Hay Festival (Hay Festival)
“I was onto Alan quite early,” she continued. “I’m very glad no one came with me because God he was entertaining, and he was a brilliant winner and it would have ruined the programme. But it was purely on circumstantial evidence.”
Balding said that she was suspicious of Carr’s motives after the “murder” of pop star Paloma Faith in the first episode of the series, who came into the series allied with her real-life friend Carr.
“Who was with Paloma?” Balding remembered asking herself. “Who was with her, but no one would suspect would do that? And that was my theory. But nobody listened.”
Balding also held aloft a notebook that she had bought long in advance of appearing on Celebrity Traitors, but which she used on the series to make notes on her fellow contestants. Across the front of it is, ironically, the words: “Times I was right and nobody listened.”
Alan Carr in last year’s ‘Celebrity Traitors’ (BBC)
The broadcaster, who has hosted sports events and shows on the BBC and Channel 4 since 1995, added that she found the experience of appearing on Celebrity Traitors “really difficult”.
“I am a very trusting person,” she said. “If people are either dogs or cats, I am very much a dog. I go up to people with my tail wagging. I want to be friends with everyone. I’m a pathetic people-pleaser. I just want to get along with everyone. So to be put into a position where you’re forced to not trust people, I found that really difficult.”
Balding was ultimately banished from the series in its fourth episode, after (incorrect) suspicion fell on her via her fellow Faithfuls.
Balding was appearing on a panel at Hay alongside author Harriet Tyce, who sparked a minor storm in the civilian version of The Traitors last year, along with the historian David Olusoga, who appeared in Balding’s Traitors series.
The new series of Celebrity Traitors is currently being filmed in Scotland, with stars including Richard E Grant, Jerry Hall, Miranda Hart and Michael Sheen all confirmed to appear.
This week’s Hay Festival, which is running in Hay-on-Wye until Sunday (31 May), previously saw the actor Ashley Walters discuss allegations that his series Top Boy “glamourised violence”.
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