The Traitors

 I don't normally write about TV.  It's even rarer that I will actually sit and watch a reality TV show.  Emma and I gave up on Strictly about seven years ago (has Russell Grant been voted out yet?) and I only watched the very first series of Big Brother before concluding that it was less a social experiment and more the beginning of the current culture in which everyone starts out their TV career on a reality show and ends up presenting Newsnight.  Or similar. Ok. Maybe only Hilarious TV Disasters on Channel 5. But you get the idea.

The Traitors is not a social experiment either.  It's just a different way of offering vanity junkies a chance to get a break in TV.  All they need to do is debase themselves for long enough to get noticed. Yet the show does illustrate perfectly why reality shows have lasted for as long as they have. By now they are pretty much the only shows out there.  It is wildly addictive.  Probably because it panders to our base instinct to look at others and judge them before criticising and gossiping about them at work the next day.  If it makes you feel better that you are not as obnoxious as these vacuous, fame-hungry weasels then fair play to you.  Maybe we all need a bit of that.

I have only watched two and a bit episodes of The Traitors.  If you haven't watched any of it yet but you still intend to I should warn you that spoilers for episodes one and two and a bit of three will be sprinkled within the rest of this piece.  

The basic premise of The Traitors is simple enough.  A group of people (22 I think) are taken to a remote Scottish castle where they are greeted by Strictly foghorn Claudia Winkleman.  Only they get a different Claudia from the one who pollutes our screens from September to December on a Saturday night.  This Claudia is much more reserved, considered and - as it turns out - utterly ruthless.  

Standing outside the castle she tells the group that they are all in with a chance of winning up to £120,000.  She mentions that figure repeatedly throughout episode one but always with the words 'up to' as a prefix.  Which suggests that whoever comes out of this shit show smelling of loyalty will not quite scoop that amount all for themselves.  To win at least a share of it all they have to do to is survive.  For as long as they do they will take part in group tasks to build up the prize fund.  So by day they are working as a team before each night one of them will be 'murdered' by The Traitors and therefore forced to leave.  With nothing, as Anne Robinson used to say before they gave the gig to Romesh because - let's be honest - Romesh is not on TV nearly enough is he?

Before the contestants even enter the castle Claudia displays her new found ruthless streak.  She asks them to line-up according to how likely they think they are to win the competition.  Those who fancy their chances at one end sliding down through those who are not so sure either way right down towards those who reckon they are a bit of a long shot at the other end of the line.  How right two of them at the fag end of the line are, as they are then instantly dismissed.  Punished for their lack of self belief or - more likely - for their hateful faux humility. Or for the kind of sensationalist ‘drama’ that these shows thrive on.  The only consolation for these two lads is that they presumably get to go back on the luxurious steam train which brought them to the castle.  It looked like there was some stunning views on the journey.  Not at all like getting the boneshaker from Thatto Heath to Lime Street.  

Shock eviction out of the way, who are The Traitors who are set to embark on this murderous spree?  The titular characters are three members of the group selected by Claudia.  She does this by sitting them all at a round table and getting them to blindfold themselves.  She then walks around said table and touches three of them on the shoulder to indicate that they have been selected for some heavy duty treachery.  She selects Alyssa, Wilf and Amanda.  We are not told why but at the end of each episode - or at least the two I have seen in full - the trio gather round to deliberate in a dark room like the broom cupboard that The Young Ones held that house meeting in.  You know the one?  Sleep gives you cancer, man, everyone knows that.

They discuss who to bump off from the show based on not very much at all.   It doesn't matter why anyway.  It's all about playing the game which means doing whatever it takes to be the last person left. Who cares who goes as long as it isn’t you? The Traitors wear hooded garments which make them look more like the Sand People than the Jedi.  Most of all they revel in their own new found self-importance, as if the self esteem fairy has just tapped them on the shoulder and told them that they absolutely fucking rock.  Particularly Alyssa who from very early on is showing worrying signs of sociopathy.  

If it seems unfair that they get to choose who goes on the basis that they are never going to choose themselves then fear not.  Those desperately clever reality show devisors have worked in a mechanism for The Traitors to leave along the way too.  As well as 'murders' there are 'banishments'.  These again involve the big round table.  Everyone sits around it - including The Traitors so that their identity is not revealed to the others (known somewhat mawkishly as Faithfuls) - where they argue about who they think The Traitors might be before each getting their own vote on it.  They all vote for one person who they think is a Traitor and the person with the most votes gets back on the steam train and goes home.  Or maybe the steam train was just for show in the opening episode and they actually get picked up by their significant other in their Ford Focus, who knows?  

While it is possible that a Traitor could get the most votes in this process they do still have the advantage of knowing that they are a Traitor and of knowing who the other traitors are.  This would seem to protect them from receiving the three votes that they possess between them.  Not a huge advantage but not a pure democracy either. There are more echoes of The Weakest Link here as we go around the room revealing who each person has chosen to vote off.  

The first victim of the vote is Nicky, a 45 year-old mother of a 26 year-old man.  She is missing a hand, and openly admits in The Traitors' version of the diary room that if she wins the money she will be buying herself a new hand.  All of which is a bit Luke/Anakin Skywalker but the real problem with it for me is that it portrays disabled people as being desperate to fix whatever disability they have.  We are really not in most cases.  Most of us are just trying to fix society so that having only one hand doesn't get you voted off a lucrative reality TV show.  We have probably got it the wrong way around.  It is probably easier for me to cure Spina Bifida than it is to stop wider society from acting like ableist goons.  

Much like The Traitors, The Faithfuls don’t have a lot of reasoning for their choice. All they can muster is some psychobollocks about Nicky having ‘planted seeds’ in others. If depriving someone of a chance to win a small fortune for spurious reasons is difficult for the group - Traitor or Faithful - it’s nothing next to how uncomfortable the viewer feels watching them all sheepishly turn over their voting cards to reveal the name of Nicky. Alyssa actually cries at one point. A superb display of over-acting with a blatantly sinister undertone. 

Yet Nicky’s best moment of her short stay is still to come. Before she leaves she is required to reveal to the group whether they were right to vote her off as a Traitor or whether they have reduced the number of Faithfuls. Not being Wilf, Alyssa or Alison she is of course a Faithful. Cue more crying, over-acting and several idiots being ‘100% sure’ she was a Traitor. All except one agree that it is absolutely unbelievable that Nicky was not a Traitor. Which it absolutely is not. There was zero evidence in the short time that they knew her except for an absent hand. The one outlier is Aaron. He knows that Nicky has been the victim of thought deficient herd mentality and let’s the others know it. He should probably watch his back.

Back in the diary room - which isn't called that but doesn't seem to have a name so we will go with it - we learn more about this show's cast of desperadoes.  It is the one place that they know that only the show's producers and subsequently its viewers are listening.  The rest of the time, when they are within the group, everyone is either trying to stay in the background and not saying very much or they are putting on a show.  Or both.  It is here we learn that Alex - a sort of young Lesley Ash without the lip debacle - is in a relationship with another contestant.  Sorry. Another Faihful..  Pink-haired non-entity Tom.  They are keeping it a secret, she tells us.  Whether or not the producers of the show know this is not quite clear.  Probably not, but it is never explicitly stated.  

One man who definitely doesn't know is love-struck simpleton Matt.  Alex has deliberately been flirting with Matt to throw everybody off the scent about her relationship with Tom.  At one point when it looks like Alex might actually be murdered by The Traitors Matt actually and almost tearfully refers to her as 'possibly his future wife'.  At this point my cringe-ometer starts making a loud alarm sound and I almost have to turn the TV off.  He has just met her and he is talking about marrying her.  As if even without Tom's presence the fact that they are competing for a huge sum of money won't cause any major issues between them along the way.  As if they are Katniss and Peeta, refusing to play the Gamemakers' sick sport.  Matt's delusion is a tough watch.  Meanwhile Alex's willingness to inflict this cruelty on him is exactly the sort of quality that the eventual champion is likely to possess.  

Which brings us on to something else that I didn't like about The Traitors.  The way that we - the viewers - and the surviving contestants get to find out who has been whacked overnight.  Matt has probably been whacking himself but that is another story. Everyone is required to go to breakfast together every morning except for the obvious absentee.  When everyone has arrived except one person then it becomes clear who has bought it.  

Yet because this is a TV show they have to ratchet up the tension for us.  So they get the survivors to come down in small groups until they are down to around three and then two.  What we know is that the person who comes in last and therefore is the last survivor is also someone that we have recently seen The Traitors discussing in their broom cupboard killing meetings.  If I was the last survivor I would be wondering why I have been asked to come down so long after everybody else.  I would be thinking that there has clearly been a discussion about getting rid of me and I would then be wondering how long I had left.  Maybe they haven't made the connection between entering the breakfast room last and the killing meetings.  They are not privy to them like we are, but it seems kind of obvious, doesn’t it? It cannot be a coincidence that Alex - who was one of three discussed in the previous show by The Traitors - enters the room last. 

In doing so she reveals that ex-copper Claire from Hull has spent her last day in this dystopian ego fest.  Claire who only a 10-minute edit earlier had told us how good she was at knowing when people are lying. She was one of the ringleaders in the ousting of Nicky so it is hard to feel sorry for her. 

Again there seems little logic in her expulsion but at this stage there are slim pickings when it comes to justification for banishment. I’m sure as the series goes on and relationships grow and crumble in equal measure there will at least be some classic grudging going on. That we can get our heads around. That is something which should help us understand why hopefuls are exiting faster than Wales at a World Cup.

I’m just not sure whether I’ll still be watching. After another round of tear-shedding at the loss of Claire I start to wonder how long this cycle of argument-vote-disbelief and tears-murder-more disbelief and tears can go on for. And how long will Matt’s ordeal go on for? 

This is why I rarely watch reality shows.