‘What are you?’
‘A traitor!’
As first-day exchanges go, I feel certain this was not what anyone taking part in, making or watching Celebrity Traitors was expecting to hear, as the household names and influencers gathered in their Scottish castle for the much-vaunted second UK celebrity season.
Given that the whole idea of the programme is to watch people who are having to lie, lie, while watching people who are not lying come under suspicion, this did rather buck the trend.
But that’s what you get for inviting Richard E Grant onto your show – chaos.
His interrogator in this memorable first-episode exchange, which will probably see the eccentric 69-year-old get booted out sooner rather than later, was the comedian Joe Lycett. Now some may observe that Joe, being about the least threatening thing in the entire estate – somewhere between the snooker table and the chunky wine glasses – should be the least likely culprit to reduce the seasoned actor to a helpless and hapless confessor. But I think it is exactly this innocence that caught Richard out.
I’m basing this on my recollection of several interviews endured by the then-new Prime Minister Gordon Brown in 2007 (bear with me on this). I can’t remember exactly what the big issues of the day were, but shortly after Labour anointed him leader of the UK – in much the same way that they chose the new bloke this past summer – our Gordon braved the entire circuit of hard-hitting news journalists in print, on radio and on TV, overcoming his supposed weaknesses in presentation with friendly, direct and economical answers which brought down the missiles of acerbic rhetoric by deploying the quaint old dirigibles of nuance.
And then he came up against the perma-smile that is Lorraine Kelly on Good Morning Britain and got his arse handed to him on a plate.
I think if the self-described ‘Swazi-boy’ had come up against a more combative or intimidating interlocutor, he would have been ready for the fight, the subterfuge, the sleight of hand and the misdirection required to throw them off the scent.
Richard had just offered up the idea that Joe could be a traitor himself, stepping towards him excitedly with a half-formed theory that relied on Joe’s possession of a shield – immunity from being murdered that night – before suddenly sensing his logic trickle away with the realisation that said shield had been won prior to the choosing of the traitors.
Joe came back with ‘I could be but I’m not, I’m a faithful,’ a response you would expect from a faithful. Or a traitor.
Then came his ‘What are you?’ and, on hearing Richard say ‘A traitor’, even said ‘You’re what?’, as if willing his unintended victim to save himself from the more exacting inquisition which would inevitably follow.
Richard’s was not an answer you would expect from a faithful. Just a traitor. Or a lunatic. His survival on the show now seems to hinge on convincing everyone that he is the latter – which is at least credible in its own right.
Like many people of my age, I’ve been a fan of his ever since his film breakthrough in the British comedy cult classic Withnail And I (1987). Absurdly, as well as my perfectly normal ownership of two DVD versions of this film, I also still own a shop-bought VHS copy, despite my VHS player having recently died.
I have watched most of his films, read his first autobiography – as well as that of Withnail’s director Bruce Robinson – and, in that way that cements us to our screen heroes, I feel like I know him, and if I were to pass him in a corridor I’d half expect him to remember me, despite our paths never having crossed.
So I feel like I know what made him say such a ridiculous thing, over which he quickly admitted regret – to us viewers, anyway.
As a trained actor with an IMDB catalogue to die for, as a man who has earned respect among his peers on stage and screen, and as an always curious student of the science of performance, I think he just felt in that moment that trotting out the same line as Joe, the same line everyone on the show has always been obliged to recite regardless of their role in the game or their intent or character – was simply beneath him as an actor. It didn’t have sufficient truth.
Because this is the thing about acting, which I feel I can assert despite having nowhere near the training, experience or nous of the actors in this series – acting is not just lying. Most actors are terrible liars. The process Richard is used to following – along with Michael Sheen, Miranda Hart, Ross Kemp and the other actors in the castle – involves imbibing words that someone else has written until you know them so well that you can’t say them wrongly, and then going into a room and paying no mind to them whatsoever, in the certain knowledge that when your fellow actors say their words, yours will come out. And not just ‘out’ as your ‘character’ would say them, but ‘out’ as you would say them if you were in the exact situation prescribed by the playwright/screenwriter.
Actors are never looking to deceive an audience because watching someone try to be someone else is boring. People-watching, on the other hand, is fascinating because human behaviour is invariably relatable. Acting is a search for truth.
Even as the nervous laughter caught hold among the others in the room, Richard doubled down on his first answer, refusing to sully himself with the inauthentic reply that was expected of him.
‘What’s the point of being in the game if you’re not?’ he went on, blinking and offering an unconvincing ‘You know?’ to follow, as he raised his non-alcoholic red wine to his lips.
There is a discipline called improvisation and actors do try it out from time to time, but fundamentally, Richard had gone in without a script and lost his way at the first opportunity.
The silence was broken by James Blunt’s almost embarrassed ‘It’s an interesting angle’.
Richard later offered a blatantly retro-fitted excuse involving the whole thing having been an attempt to invoke a scene from Spartacus, but that was poor plotting.
I fully expect Richard to get banished following the first round table, though there is a little grain of hope that the group will get side-tracked into some ludicrous theory that emerges at the last minute, prompting them to banish a faithful instead. I’ve no doubt the producers would be delighted if the chaos continued.
We’ll find out when the third episode airs on BBC One on Thursday at 8pm.
And if you’re busy, don’t forget to programme your VHS recorder.
