“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.
