After my invocation last week for a Storm (Agatha) Christie to blow through The Celebrity Traitors and create some jeopardy in what looked like a cape-carriers’ cake-walk, a reader got in touch and contested that I should instead have invoked Storm Columbo.
Well, ignore us both! Let us all lie supine in supplication to Cyclone Sheen!
Welsh board-treader Michael deployed his finely lacquered larynx to devastating effect in Thursday’s penultimate episode, inviting all present to voice their suspicions about him – which he batted back with aplomb – before launching into an irresistible incantation of evidence against Maya Jama and James Acaster which put the very mark of death upon their quivering souls. The man cursed with the epithet ‘father of the round table’ had restyled himself ‘vengeful daddy’, and all while keeping it civil and saying they were ‘playing a blinder’.
Such was the forcefulness of his rhetoric that James A simply crumbled and became the second traitor in the series to just ‘fess up. But whereas Richard E Grant was painted as a blabbermouth – not least by himself – James A’s demise has been portrayed as some kind of victory for faithfulness in treachery. Not sure I buy that. Okay, he was recruited in a unique manner, being faced with accepting traitordom or being the first to be murdered, but he seemed pretty calm and assured when he pitched for the role at Amol Rajan’s expense.
‘You know that we work well as a team,’ he had told Maya, ‘I’m pretty confident I’m the right decision.’
With the earnest comedian dispatched, the traitors belatedly murdered the vocal vizier of the valleys, having unwisely opted to smoke Sharon the previous night, out of caution. But his damage was done, and even as he said goodnight to Maya around the campfire on his last evening and was told ‘See you on the other side’ (a bit of a giveaway), he seemed sanguinely to have accepted his destiny.
Once his demise had been revealed to the others at the final breakfast, the only remaining mystery revolved around whether ‘King’ Kenny could command the confidence of the cartel of rekindled contestants and so avoid Maya’s imminent fate.
There followed some larking about on go-karts and helicopters and blowing stuff up and that, and then it was down to the real drama of the final round table, during which Kenny did the treacherous thing of doing the faithful-looking thing of voting for the person ‘with the most heat on them’ – heat which had primarily come about as a result of Maya having ‘flown under the radar’ – and in doing so, he ‘stabbed her in the back’. These phrases occur in these series with such rapidity that I end up visualising a low-flying squadron of rotisserie chickens being summarily harpooned by celestial four-pronged forks. Before being ‘thrown under a bus’.
At the final fire pit, each player has to decide whether to accept their fellow players as faithfuls or, if they still have suspicions, have another round of voting. Even if one person wants to continue, they banish again. I was saying to my family that it would be better if the identity of the one who wanted to continue was kept secret. And it would make more sense of the coloured-flame motif.
But then, after the dismissal of Leigh-Anne Pinnock and then Kenny after a tied vote, we would have been denied the sight of James Blunt becoming more and more agitated as he realised he’d shot himself in the foot by forcing the continuation of a game which, had he allowed it to end, would have finished with him being announced as a joint winner.
Instead, actor Sebastian ‘Bash’ Croft and comedian Romesh Ranganathan took the spoils, which enabled them to gift £41,500 each for their chosen charities, Choose Love and Refugee Council respectively.
In the after-party post-show gathering hosted by Ed Gamble, Romesh credited Bash with having steered him away from further suspecting James B and for correctly identifying Kenny as a traitor, before declaring himself to be the least deserving winner ever.
Well, it is true to say that Michael, ‘Blunty’, Sharon, Miranda and others had a hand in defeating the traitors. But in the same way that the previous non-celeb series gave us a new phenomenon in the shape of two traitors who showed unprecedented and ultimately victorious faith in each other, so Romesh displayed something rarely seen on the show – the humility consciously to abandon a theory of guilt on the basis of hearing a better argument, and not for the sake of how it would be perceived, either.
And so another 10 episodes of gloriously compelling nonsense have come to an end and we must content ourselves with the mild distraction of Christmas before our next televisual insertion into the Scottish castle.
As the credits rolled on Uncloaked on Friday night, my son asked me who I hoped would be in the next Celebrity Traitors, and for some reason I cannot fathom, the very first name that popped into my head was Liz Truss.
I’m clearly only in it for the LOLs.
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