Laters, potatoes:The Traitors.

"No cuddling guys. That's a different show" - Claudia Winkleman

I've not watched a lot of reality television in recent years so it was quite a surprise I watched TWELVE whole hours of The Traitors (BBC1/iPlayer) in the run up to Xmas. It was even more of a surprise, to myself, just how much I enjoyed the bloody thing.

The twists and turns (admittedly often engineered by the creators but that's how these things work), the shouting, the tears, the wait at the breakfast table each morning to see who'd been 'murdered', and, more than anything else, the evening eviction in which it was revealed, following their banishment, if a contestant was a 'traitor' or a 'faithful'.

If you've not watched it this will, of course, sound utterly incomprehensible so here's the basic idea. Twenty-two contestants enter a grand castle in Scotland. Three of them are informed they will be traitors and that their job is to both conceal their identities and, each night, murder one of the faithfuls. The murders, don't worry, merely come in the form of a piece of paper informing the contestant they've been 'murdered' and must leave the show.

Each day the contestants partake in a challenge in which they aim to build up a fairly decent cash prize which will go to (a) all the faithfuls remaining at the end if they have managed to banish all the traitors or (b) will be shared by any traitors remaining at the end. Completing the intrigue, every evening all contestants gather together around a large round table where they take turns to nominate, publicly, the person they wish to kick out. The person they believe is a traitor. Or, in the case of the actual traitors, the person they wish to get rid off for quite different reasons.

Once you get used to it, it's a very simple premise - but quite an addictive one. As I'd already stated this wouldn't normally be my kind of thing but a couple of good reviews pushed me in its direction and I'm glad they did. It wasn't, as I first feared, a murder mystery for morons or a game of Cluedo for cunts. 

Presided over, gleefully, by Claudia Winkleman (she divides many but I've always been quite keen on her) in a selection of ludicrously high necked sweaters. Winkleman jokes about doing yoga while scenes show traitors entering towers in hoods like something out of a Carl Theoder Dreyer film. There's the odd attempt at giving the show a Wickerman/folk horror vibe but it's never particularly cruel or vicious. It's too much fun for that.

The contestants are a fair representation of British society or at least the part of it that would sign up for such a public spectacle. They range in age from 21 business student Alyssa to 72 year old retiree Andrea and take in all types along the way. There's friendly and popular 32 year old games obsessed author Ivan, 23 year old uber confident scientist Imran, and 59 year old Fay who's a head of school welfare and soon gains a reputation for ruthlessness.

Amanda is a 54 year old estate agent with a lovely Swansea accent, Amos a bright and popular 30 year old doctor, Kieran (42, solutions consultant) comes across as a bit of a geezer, 28 year old Wilfred - a senior fundraiser, 25 year old call centre agent Meryl, and 29 year old Maddy:- a receptionist from Kent who is unafraid of going against the conventional line of thinking.

Oh, and then there's the people with slightly more daft jobs who are, perhaps unsurprisingly, in the most part a little more extrovert. Theo (26) is a cheerleading coach, Hannah (32) a comedian, and Matt (23) is a BMX athlete. He takes an instant shine to Alex (26), a presenter and actor but what Alex has not told Matt, but we - the audience are aware of, is that her partner Tom (24) is also in the castle with them.

 

Tom's a magician. Because of course he is. Initially they seem like a bunch of over excitable, cocky, pricks who can't even spell each other's names despite them being written right in front of them. But once the whooping and hollering dies down (well, a bit) you start warming to them. 24 year old property agent Aaron seems particularly sweet but, of course, that could look, to some of the others, like a technique to get the eyes off of him. He has, after all, boasted of being a "sincere and honest estate agent".

As if that's something that actually exists. Andrea's good at lying. She has, after all, worked for the UK government and Maddy may come across as ditzy but, for possibly the wrong reasons, she seems to be able to detect traitors better than the others. Which means many of the others soon suspect her. The show is a swirl of cocktail parties, peacocks, extravagant breakfast buffets, far too many black Range Rovers, retching, crying, swearing, suits of armour, chess pieces, inordinate amounts of hugging, and people whose grasp of maths is so poor they regularly refer to being "one million per cent" a faithful.

There are elements of Big Brother but just the first ever, and best, series when the guests were left to their own devices and had no idea they'd actually become famous. The ominous music played (odd versions of Britney's Toxic, Muse's take on Feeling Good, The Cranberries' Zombie, Six Underground by Sneaker Pimps, and crappy Nouvelle Vague/John Lewis advert style takes on Rockwell's Somebody's Watching Me, Nirvana's Come As You Are, and Phil Collin's In The Air Tonight all dressed up in dungeon synth dungarees) is reminiscent of the way they try to make The Apprentice look like something other than a platform for top tier tossers like Trump, Alan Sugar, and Katie Hopkins but that's not the only time the show earns unfortunate comparisons to The Apprentice.

Each day the contestants are given a challenge and split into two teams. These challenges, or missions, are probably the least interesting part of the whole show. They may consists of describing sheep, pushing barrels up a hill, igniting "magnificent beasts" (!), being buried alive, going on some utterly terrifying funfair ride that wouldn't look out of place on Scooby Doo, campanology related shenanigans, or some weird shit in a church in which they have to interact with characters in gold masks who look more or less like the VIPs from Squid Game.

Luckily these bits soon pass and they do, at least, include some rather touching moments. Perhaps most heart-warmingly when Meryl, who has dwarfism and has never been tall enough to go on normal funfair rides, gets to go upside down for the first time and is clearly very excited about it.

There are other nice moments as the contestants bond with each other while at the same time as competing against each other. It's interesting to see just how much herd mentality comes into play when humans make decisions as groups and it's instructive to see just how easy it is for dominant characters to sway others into doing their bidding for them but what was really interesting, for me, was just how bad a judge of character we all are.

Everybody likes to think they're a good judge of character but nobody really is. That's why we all end up getting hurt and let down so often in our lives. At least, here, it's just happening in an elaborate game show. It seems that previous prejudices and personality always trump critical thinking. That could lead one to taking a dim view of humankind but, instead, as the show developed, I found myself warming to most of the contestants on The Traitors and there was nobody I genuinely disliked.

I thoroughly enjoyed this show - to the extent I was genuinely looking forward to each episode - but I'm not one million per cent sure its success can be successfully repeated without the next batch of contestants being too knowing of what they're letting themselves in for and going in with prepared strategies. Its novelty factor, to me, was its strength and I had no idea where it would end up until the very end. The only thing I was certain of is that I would have been absolutely terrible at this game. I'm glad I watched it instead of taking part in it.