In Wales, adoring neighbours call her “lovely Fiona”. She’s the dotty (her word) 61-year-old who works for local government, runs a dementia-friendly lunch club and has a penchant for floral dresses. The kind of woman you’d share intimate secrets with minutes after meeting. You’d trust her to look after your house, your keys, your PIN number, your cat. Later, you’d dismiss her lightly with words like nice, harmless, or worse, “lovely”.
And those lazy assumptions are just what the cardigan-clad Butcher of Swansea, as I call her, is banking on. As she said when she introduced herself on The Traitors, “People always underestimate women of a certain age.” And how.
The moment Fiona was revealed as the secret traitor, my WhatsApp lit up with messages of “I knew it” quicker than you can say HRT. How did my fellow fiftysomething mates know? Well, we understand that society’s cloak of invisibility, which gets thrown over women of our age, is the secret weapon that may well gift Fiona, Britain’s friendliest serial killer, that £120,000 pot of BBC gold.
It’s because of this that I – and every other older woman watching – am enthusiastically rooting for the blonde with a post-menopausal glow who says she’d rather murder face to face than anonymously (minx).
Because we’re also used to being dismissed, underestimated and feeling invisible: if you’ve ever tried to get the bill in a restaurant as a woman over 50, you’ll know what I mean. But, like sixtysomething Fiona, we use this to our advantage. I can only assume the psychology team behind The Traitors is so acutely aware of how post-menopausal women move through the world they plan it into each series. And the result is telly catnip. Remember 62-year old Diane (whose son Ross witnessed her in a coffin)?
Fiona understands the assignment and has reached the life stage where f**ks are no longer given. Like all of us, she doesn’t care what anyone thinks; female people-pleasers over 50 are as rare as “gazelles jumping over bogs”, to quote one of sweary Fiona’s more innocent lines.
But Fiona is no pantomime villain – you could tell that by the look of terror in fellow Traitor Rachel’s eyes. Rachel may have had FBI body language training, but she had no idea what was coming with Fiona, the midlife master of misdirection. She went from composed overlord to gibbering minion under Fiona’s assured upward gaze – there’s a height difference of at least a foot, yet Fiona seemed to tower over Rachel.
And, at 42, poor brilliant Rachel obviously didn’t understand what “a woman of a certain age” can be capable of (just FYI, Gregg Wallace, this is the right context for the use of that phrase). Rachel doesn’t know that getting older is what many of us refer to as The Upgrade, we’re a more focused, less pliable version of ourselves. We’re good with secrets, we don’t mind telling the odd lie, and we don’t care how it makes you feel if we decide to take you on either.
Millennial Rachel hasn’t realised that without the distraction of managing all of family life, without the man-pleasing, without the self-esteem wobbles, you are free to become an altogether more confident you. You also get a cognitive upgrade (it’s true: the science says so), bulletproof emotional resilience, a shot of experience-based wisdom and the ability to adapt at speed. And, thanks to HRT, our libido is more efficient, which is menacing. And we often keep all these superpowers hidden so, like the best spies and the best Marvel villains, we utilise an element of surprise for our gain.
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I could see all this in Fiona as she strode about the castle in her cape, which the show’s producers must have had made especially for the pocket rocket. It was like watching the horror movie version of Little Red Riding Hood: where the bears get made into fur coats after having their throats slit. Fiona dispatched shouty show-off Hugo in cold blood (to the cheers of midlife women everywhere: “What an absolute golf-club idiot,” as one of my friends commented).
How did this self-confessed brilliant barrister not see it coming, he wondered? Because he was looking in the wrong place, we knew.
The best thing to come out of Swansea since Catherine Zeta Jones took out the man from Cardiff in plain sight. It was gruesome but satisfying. And I loved witnessing my Gen Z and Gen A children marvel at the jaw-dropping deception of this Gen X Welsh wonder. I cannot wait to see what she does next.
Lorraine Candy co-hosts the Postcards From Midlife podcast, and for more of Lorraine Candy’s writing, find her newsletter here
