At the time of writing I’m still in the dark as to whether Richard E. Grant’s Celebrity Traitors gambit – viz, admitting to his fellow players that he has been chosen as a traitor within minutes of being secretly selected – pays off. Will it prove the counterintuitive master stroke that wins him the game? Or will it turn out to be the fantastically naive indiscretion which sees him sent packing shortly after his first and only murder victim Amol ‘glottal stops? Nein danke!’ Rajan?
If you know what I’m talking about without my having to explain, shame on you. You are one of the nine million idiots who have wasted the past week getting emotionally invested in the prospects, in a silly, fake telly game, of a second-rate mummer who was only ever in one decent film, Withnail & I, and that was nearly 40 years ago. Worse than that, you now know who Maya Jama is. And Leigh-Anne Pinnock. And King Kenny.
Then again, I’m one to talk. I, too, have been cajoled and manipulated and brainwashed into rooting for Grant. He wears such lovely tweed suits; his impish smile is so beguiling; his teeth and his suntan and his hairline are always so immaculate. If ever we were to meet in real life, I’m sure we’d become the bestest of friends. (Just so long as he doesn’t read The Spectator. True, though, what I said about his film career, isn’t it?)
But isn’t this exactly the problem? We don’t know these people. Quite a few of them, I suspect, might have more metaphorical bodies under their floorboards than Fred and Rosemary West. In fact, in James Blunt’s case – have you seen his latest pop video? – I’d almost put money on it. One thing these weird creatures definitely aren’t is anything like us. They are all actors, of one variety or another – what the ancient Greeks called ‘hypokrites’ – and their job is to deceive. Yes, they might come across well on the screen but that’s only because you have something they want: your attention.
This is why, you might argue, Grant has played a blinder by doing his apparently very stupid thing. In the first Celebrity Traitors, the winner Alan Carr did so well out of his victory that he ended up buying his own Scottish castle. But maybe Grant thought to himself: ‘Winning would be just too obvious, too vulgar. How much more dramatic, and headline-grabbing, and speculation-pushing a move for season two might it be were I to have the whole show in the palm of my hands, and then just toss it all away like the butt of a Camberwell carrot?’
Or maybe he didn’t. It’s a truism to say that everything is fake these days but rarely can this be truer than in the case of a show where lying is the entire point. I certainly wouldn’t put it past the producers having asked Grant to make his suicide move because what they’re after is strong storylines with lots of twists and turns, not boring reality. If they don’t come naturally, well, why not manufacture them?
And where are we on Claudia Winkleman’s hair? I know I’ve raised this issue before but it has become another unhealthy obsession. According to AI – which claims to have heard this from Winkleman’s stylist – it’s definitely not a wig. It adds that Winkleman maintains her fringe ‘with regular trims and a long-standing loyalty to Head & Shoulders conditioner’. Really? A celebrity in that league daubing her most valuable feature in Procter & Gamble sludge? Nothing to do with the fact that she’s a paid Head & Shoulders ambassador, then. ‘I’ve always used it. And I love it,’ she tells Grazia.
Celebrity Traitors isn’t just misleading and facile but it’s also very likely evil
I resent water cooler* TV for precisely this reason. It’s a form of humiliation ritual which, in the guise of renewed social cohesion (‘Remember how much happier we were when everyone watched Morecambe and Wise?’), we all have our brains zapped by cathode rays and get reduced to the level of the lowest common denominator.
Celebrity Traitors isn’t just misleading and facile and a massive waste of life but it’s also very likely evil. Those cowled robes the Traitors wear, like the ones in that Kubrick true-lives-of-the-Hollywood-elite documentary Eyes Wide Shut: should we really be making light of such things? The scenes in the church where the slebs get shut up in coffins: isn’t this all a bit Yale Skull and Bones meets Bohemian Grove? And it’s not exactly an edifying concept: the game show where you gain everyone’s trust, stab the lot of them in the back and then get hailed as a hero for your masterly cunning, ruthlessness and duplicity.
With four more weeks still to go I would love to be able to announce that I’m quitting now in properly high-minded disgust at this excrescence of unhealthily addictive, putrescent, malign and nefarious social conditioning. But if I did that I’d be lying.
*Note to younger readers. Water coolers were things we supposedly gathered round in the old days when people had jobs and went to offices and talked to one another not on their phones.
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