It’s been five days now since the final episode of The Celebrity Traitors on BBC One, and i’m still shook. What a phenomenal piece of television that was (and i’m sure it showed in the viewing figures).
I’ll admit, whilst I’m a big fan of games of all types, i’m also a fan of competition shows, so naturally get sucked in to these shows on a regular basis. I’ve an avid watcher of The Traitors of the previous few series, as well as things like Great British Bake Off and Great British Sewing Bee, both of which have celebrity versions. The trouble with all of these shows, is that the celebrity versions are often pretty dire. The celebrities themselves are often unknown to me (perhaps that says more about me than the state of what constitutes a celebrity these days) but more often that not, regardless of if i know who the person is, they tend to just come across as a bit of an idiot.
All of this meant my expectations for the celebrity version of The Traitors was low. The first thing that surprised me was that they actually featured a majority of people that I knew, not only that but the average age of the contestants was about 50. Something that’s becoming increasingly unheard of when it comes to these shows.
Within the first episode i was hooked. The fact that (spoiler alert) they chose the particular people they did to be Traitors was genius, and proved to provide some absolutely television gold moments.
But what makes the original show so appealing and is really the mechanic of the game is that no one knows each other and everyone if hiding something in some way. This means, as soon as the game starts, everyone is suspicious of each other and on the back foot. With the celebrity version everyone already knows everyone else, they know all the dirt, all the secrets and lies. They’ve probably spent a lot of time in each others company already, and if not, it doesn’t take too long to slot all the pieces of someone together. Coupled with this is the fact that, the moment a person reaches the public eye in the way these people have, they have to embody a personality – their public persona – in other words they act. And if someone is already acting, then it doesn’t take much of a leap of imagination to work out that they can creep under the radar of the other contestants, because they are already used to lying, and acting in a certain way. All of this is what, for me, made the show so good… yes several of the celebs came across as being idiots as with other shows, but that did not detract from the rest of what was going on in the slightest.
And that ending!! Well. Edge of your seat stuff all the way to the last few minutes. Brilliant.
What did you think? Did you like it? How do you think it compared to the original show?
