“If this was a party, you’d be really chuffed about who turned up,” comedian Lucy Beaumont says in Celebrity Traitors (BBC One) 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”.
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’d 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’d never heard of Joe Marler, but he’s one of the funniest people here.
The format is unchanged from the original version of the show: the contestants are ferried to The Traitors’ castle in the picturesque Highlands, where some of them are secretly selected by 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 takes home up to £100,000 for their chosen charity.
In the launch episode at least, everyone behaves exactly as you would expect. Alan Carr is hilarious. Tom Daley models his own knitwear. 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”.
The producers don’t give them an easy ride. The first challenge is physically tough. Marler and Daley, unsurprisingly, are good at it. Clare Balding takes charge and gives instructions in head-girl fashion. The task also involves brain-power, which is where Nick Mohammed, perhaps the only Ted Lasso star to have studied geophysics at Cambridge, comes into his own.
I can’t tell you exactly what the challenge is because the BBC takes this show so seriously that it has become slightly hysterical and the pre-show spoiler list even extends to Claudia’s outfits (Claudia herself isn’t this precious – last week I saw her queuing uncomplainingly at the checkout in a particularly stressful branch of Ikea). Jonathan Ross gives her a run for her money in the clothing stakes anyway, changing in the first episode from a Val Doonican jumper to a Top Gun flight suit.
Alan Carr is hilarious in the launch episode of Celebrity Traitors – BBC/Studio Lambert/Euan Cherry
Is it as good as the non-celebrity version? Not quite. Even the show’s creators would admit it. When The Traitors first aired, I interviewed the duo behind it, Stephen Lambert and Tim Harcourt, and they said: “The disadvantage of the celebrity show is that they don’t really care. The prize money isn’t going to have a big impact on their lives and, anyway, they’re more concerned about how they come across as celebrities rather than winning the show.” Every word of this is true. On the other hand, the fakery involved in being a celebrity might turn some of this lot into elite-level Traitors.
And the show is so well-made and well-edited that it is guaranteed to entertain. The launch episode really gets going at the end, when the Traitors are given their first mission and panic about how to pull it off. “I thought I wanted to be a Traitor,” one of them wails. “I can’t keep a secret. What am I going to do?” Can’t wait for episode two. I’m already hooked.
The Celebrity Traitors starts on BBC One on Wednesday 8 October at 9pm
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.yahoo.com ’
