Parlour Games: Traitorously good telly
In a sly, affectionate ode to The Celebrity Traitors, Freddie Hutchins peers behind the parlour curtain to ask why last night’s super-popular telly finale left us feeling quite so bruised. What was Nick thinking??? And why does our obsession with betrayal run deeper than any round table twist?
(Image: BBC/Studio Lambert/Cody Burridge/Artwork - BBC Creative)
Oh, Nick, Nick, Nick… seeing slippers where there were none.
Gosh, but don’t we love a cultural moment? With the finale tally not yet in, viewing figures for Celebrity Traitors are already being remarked as unprecedented in modern times. Spoken of in the same breath as a royal wedding or England cup final, there is a sense, in the best way, of our relishing a moment for national conversation that isn’t, for once, politically divisive. After all, it’s just a game…
And what a game! As the Victorians knew all too well, nothing beats fun in the parlour after dinner – and here we are, a century on, crowding onto our sofas of an autumn evening to prove them right. But of course this souped-up, £1 million per episode version of wink murder isn’t about the game itself, but the people who play it.
And play it they did, though awfully badly on the whole – through endless Faithful banishments and flabbergastingly misguided speculations. And along the way we were treated to some extraordinary outfits, excellent one-liners (yes, Alan, but also here’s looking at you, Ruth Codd) and one sensationally-timed, BAFTA-winning (surely?) fart.
(Image: Betches UK / Maddy Smedley)
But on the whole, I defy any Traitors fan to claim that the missions, or the breakfasts, or the many memeable moments contained within each episode are the reasons they watch. These are nice-to-haves; the gilding on a poison black lily. The substance of the Traitors is, of course, the round tables: the will-they-won’t-they, the can’t-look-away rubbernecking on the car crash potential of human behaviour to get it so, so wrong.
Oh, Nick, Nick, Nick.
The popular Victorian parlour game of hunt the slipper involved sitting in a circle, passing a slipper player-to-player behind their backs whilst a person in the middle guessed – by movement? …by expression? …by gut instinct..??? – who’s holding the slipper. Nick, a clue for you: it’s NOT JOE.
As Claudia said to the rapidly-dwindling, ever-bungling Faithful in Episode 6: You’re breaking my heart. With Nick’s eleventh-hour wobble, he certainly broke mine. But why? After all, it’s just a game…
(Image: BBC/Studio Lambert/Cody Burridge/Artwork - BBC Creative)
“With the finale tally not yet in, viewing figures for Celebrity Traitors are already being remarked as unprecedented in modern times.”
I think because, by the time the players have played and the viewers have viewed through to the end game, it isn’t just a game anymore. Unavoidably, tantalisingly, horrifyingly… somehow there’s so much more at stake. Trust, Love… what does it take, really? What does it take to say I love you, and mean it? What does it take to hear I trust you, and to feel it back? And why… why is it so hard?
Sitting deep down at the heart of the human condition is the cold, dark struggle with these deceptively simple conceits. And for all its gloss and entertainment factor, Traitors is a reminder that, sometimes, the stakes are high and oftentimes, heartbreakingly, we don’t get it right. If Alan in his first moments of triumph did feel remorse, it was surely this: how easy it is to betray rather than to trust, to squander good faith rather than work to earn it, to expect a cynical outcome rather than hope for something better. And we love it! Don’t we? After all, that’s life, that’s entertainment. It’s just a game…
Sometimes, I’m not so sure. The end of Series 2, with the betrayal of an innocent Faithful by an excellent Traitor felt, in the moment, very unlike entertainment to me. It made me feel a bit sick. It made me, perhaps not unaccountably, think of the fundamental brokenness of two-party political systems, of the unbridgeable distances between opposing points of view in modern discourse, of the horrifying reality of the current incumbent of the White House in possession of the nuclear codes.
As the excellent recent Kathryn Bigelow film A House of Dynamite ponders: who backs down first? Who says stop, now? That’s enough? Ultimately, who dares to say I trust you… and mean it? There isn’t enough love in this world, and what there is is surely more precious because it survives in spite of our seemingly limitless capacity for betrayal and fuckuppery. Thank goodness for our capacity to forgive… as demonstrated so nobly by Nick and David even as they reeled from the shock of Alan’s deception. But by that point, perhaps, the stakes were low. My heart had already been broken by Nick’s betrayal of Joe.
But what great telly! Yes, yes – I agree. With the small reminder that perhaps we’re all dancing at the edge of the abyss, laughing at the end of the world. Oh, to be back in the parlour, warm by the fireside and the curtains firmly closed against the encroaching dark.
And as for Paloma… there is definitely no imperative for her to forgive her former friend’s betrayal. There’s an album’s worth of material in that, at least.
“But what great telly! Yes, yes – I agree. With the small reminder that perhaps we’re all dancing at the edge of the abyss, laughing at the end of the world.”
Always here for the epic drone shots of Scotland
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