“If this was a party, you’d be really chuffed about who turned up,” muses the comedian Lucy Beaumont as the cast of the UK’s first Celebrity Traitors settles into Ardross Castle, the Scottish home of BBC One’s wildly successful reality show. She’s not wrong. Props to the show’s producers, who’ve managed to pull off the seemingly impossible and fill the available slots with actually recognisable names. You can practically hear the Strictly team seething from the next desk over. Perhaps it’s testament to just how popular this game of deception, backstabbing and using the word “yourself” in a way that defies the ordinary rules of grammar has become since it debuted in 2022.
Stephen Fry, Jonathan Ross, Celia Imrie, Clare Balding and Tom Daley are among the famous faces who’ve decamped to the Highlands to attempt to win up to £100,000 for charity. Unlike the civilian version of the show, there’s no real need for the long train ride sequence to allow for the viewers to get to know the cast, so our celebrities are instead whisked up to the castle in a fleet of blacked-out Range Rovers, like a royal cavalcade, or an organised crime group closing ranks.
But instead of stopping here for a few canapes and welcome drinks, as TV host Kate Garraway admits she’d been hoping, the celebs are immediately driven off to a graveyard, where all the headstones are, in a particularly morbid flourish, carved with the contestants’ names. Presiding over this grim scene is, of course, presenter Claudia Winkleman. Does she dial down her unique brand of slightly menacing camp, just because she’s now dealing with her telly peers? Absolutely not.
Inevitably, the stars are tasked with, yes, digging their own graves, in the hope that they’ll find a shield (with the power to protect them from the first “murder” of the series) buried in the dirt. “Personally, I wanted to be cremated and have my ashes thrown off the London Eye,” says Alan Carr, in the first of many quips.
There’s something quite bizarre about watching a big group of recognisable people entirely suspending disbelief to throw themselves into the show’s macabre tasks. At times, when they’re all gathered together looking chilly and dishevelled, waiting for Winkleman to throw them some instructions, it’s as if we’ve chanced upon some kind of celebrity outdoor pursuits holiday.
From here, it’s pretty much classic Traitors stuff, with the contestants returning to the castle so that Winkleman can pick out which of them will be donning big cloaks and congregating in the turret that evening, as a moody cover of “Wonderwall” plays. And in the next task, poor Balding stokes up suspicion simply because she’s bad at reading instructions, while Winkleman flounces around wearing frilly sleeves borrowed from Captain Hook’s wardrobe.
There are so many big personalities vying for screen time in the first episode that it’s hard to single out who is going to be a hit with viewers. But Carr is a constant source of hilarity, and when he is picked as one of three Traitors, his stage fright is pretty amusing (“I’m worse than Linda!” he cries after nearly giving the game away, a nod to season three’s most OTT Traitor).
Fellow comedians Beaumont and Joe Wilkinson offer a more droll, deadpan humour that makes a pleasing contrast to the show’s dramatic machinations, while Ted Lasso star Nick Mohammed seems almost too earnestly nice to be good at this game. His first move is to help out 73-year-old Imrie, already very much the grande dame of the castle, with the digging task; it’s precisely the kind of kindness that earns suspicion in this show. And Fry is, well, very Fry, ready with a Greek myth reference or a dash of Shakespearean knowledge.
In terms of how far they’ll get, all the celebs are so good at performing for the cameras that, at this stage, it’s a little tricky to get a handle on their gameplay. And everyone’s so damn amenable to one another that you struggle to imagine them going nuclear at the round table.
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Traitors diehards were fearful that a celebrity version would go against everything that made it so watchable. But, based on this opener at least, they don’t have anything to worry about – this new spin-off stays faithful to the show we know and love.
