CELEBRITY TRAITORS: First Episode Reaction (Free Bonus Episode)

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Hello, and welcome to this bonus episode of The Wrestlers Entertainment, a special bonus episode.

I think I can say Richard.

I'm Marina Hyde.

And I'm Richard Osman, and we have just watched, as I hope you have as well, the first episode of Celebrity Traitors.

If you have not watched it, please put down your podcast.

Do not listen to this because there will be spoilers.

This is for people who've just watched it.

It's going to go off.

Oh, it is going to go off.

I've got to say, that did not disappoint.

No.

I loved it so much.

Let us begin.

The cast, fine, you've read the list of the cast, but when you see it, you just think, my God, this is bizarre.

Reality TV, once people regarded for washed out drags, this is the most prestige format currently on British television.

It's pretty alien.

You've heard of basically everybody.

And if you haven't, there's a couple you're like, oh, I see why they're on.

And also, they're all genuinely excited to be there and not in that normal reality show wave.

Oh, my God, I can't believe we're here.

This is so exciting.

They're genuinely oh my god we are in the castle this is going to be absolutely awesome the celebrity nature of it is totally crucial that's what really struck me we're watching a totally different version of the show now as we discussed which is why it really really works it works to have a celebrity version of this and a regular version because there are different dynamics at play the main one being obviously they all know each other or of each other to varying degrees and you can be pretty sure they've googled if they if they don't there's such a cute bit when when Stephen Fry says to Nico, Omilana, and of course you're the guy who does the pranks.

Nico's going, you've heard of me.

And he goes, yeah, no, so you knew you were going to be on.

The other thing you notice about it is, which is sort of funny and quite excruciating at moments, is that it's far more performative because I found that almost the bigger these stars were, the more annoying they were.

So it's incredibly love.

Well, no, but there were some incredibly lovyish bits at the start.

But you realize is that they're probably just really, really nervous.

you you can really which you so rarely which you still see but they're all out of their comfort zones because it's one thing being you know it being your show this isn't their show they are in a group they're not the star they're just one of a group it's not their stage anymore and it's very it's surprisingly i found discombobulating people who you think of as so poised because you know you've watched like jonathan ross a million times like boss the whole of everything for decades and suddenly you're like oh you're just a guy getting out of a car with a lot of other people and it's, it's very, it's, I found it quite compelling.

It's very democratizing.

Yeah.

No, I mean, Ingra said instantly, she said, it's fascinating.

They are all in a position where they don't know what's going to happen.

Yeah.

And they have so rarely been in that position in the recent times of their, because you do become that because you're in control of your brand and who you are, and you work with people that you trust.

And suddenly, you're like, well, I trust this brand.

I trust the traders.

I know I love this.

But suddenly, I have no idea what is going to happen.

Well, that's what we talked about before when we found out it was happening.

And we talked about that months ago.

We said, this runs the risk, despite being everybody's favorite show, etc.,

it runs the risk of being very, very exposing.

And there's something so kind of tempting about being in that castle if you're a massive fan of the show.

And you almost think some people

wouldn't have thought it through enough because everybody's got a screen persona.

Everybody or a broadcast persona or YouTube persona or whatever it is, but you can't have that that when you're in this ensemble.

And your reputation is always precarious in reality TV.

And I think because people think that creators is so classy and you don't have to talk about your personal life because you're always just talking about the game, which is which distinguishes it from a lot of reality TV formats, is that people aren't talking, they deliberately edit out stuff, that they're always talking about the game and the machinations and who might be on.

That's why it works.

And, you know, whereas in Big Brother, they've got these kind of acres of time where they're talking about relationships in the past that got wrong or, you know, when I was fired from this or that there's none of that here they're talking about the game always yeah let's go straight in and talk about who the three traitors are again if you if you have not watched it we are about to give the the big spoiler so i predicted the three traitors would be jonathan cat and celia

i was just thinking i had my producers head-on but it's not it's jonathan cat and Alan and I have got to say in terms of we'll talk about Kat and Jonathan in a moment but in terms of value, Alan,

you're just straight in because he absolutely loses his mind immediately, which is so wonderful.

He cannot, even before he's chosen as a traitor,

he's almost in pieces.

Well, this is why the celebrity version of the game is different because all civilians playing that game now, anyone, and in the version that we're going to see after Christmas, now realize that the strongest position in the game, well, apart from being recruited as a traitor later on in the game, is to be a traitor because you're controlling the game.

Whereas celebrities want to be loved to some extent.

So all of them should have said, Of course, I want to be a traitor because I understand that I want to control the game.

But a lot of them did.

The one thing about if you are in the world of television, you sort of understand the format.

You understand what is happening here.

The money is going to go to charity.

You want it to go to your charity if you possibly can.

And the key thing about being if you're a television presenter, we just talked about the thing of lack of control.

is if you are a traitor, you are on television more.

Like Nigel Farage said when he's on, I'm a celebrity.

If you get picked for the tasks,

you get more screen time.

More importantly, is you feel like you've got more control over your environment.

You know, I always thought the reason that I would find it difficult is if I was a faithful and I'm lying in my distant bunk miles away from the castle at 11 p.m.

at night, I know that three people are filming up in the turret with Claudia and someone.

And

someone's making them a cup of tea and they're having a laugh and they are and whatever twist is about to happen, they know what it is.

And so they have much more of an element of control over it.

You get one hour's sleep.

I couldn't do it.

I could, I absolutely, I would honestly, I would say, kill me now.

Give me on

kind of the game, but yeah, murder me instantly.

I want to go home.

If you are a traitor, you are sort of part of the production team, you know, you are, which is what a presenter wants to be.

A presenter wants to be part of the production team.

A presenter wants to know what's happening in the world.

The second Jonathan Ross was up in that turret, he was so much more like the old, I'm going to watch Jonathan Ross push a horse up a hill.

He's having a meltdown.

All of the times I saw Jonathan Ross, I almost couldn't look at him because I was embarrassed because he wasn't the Jonathan Ross I knew.

Once, he's in the tie.

He's like, okay, I've got more control over this.

I'm, you know.

Yeah.

And, but having to deal with the chaos of Alan Carr, which

is incredibly good value.

And the lovely thing is, you know, the two of them are old pals as well.

So

there's history there, by the way.

But I loved, I mean, Kat Burns.

Amazing.

Sorry,

I know the music, but I don't know enough about her.

She's one of those ones that everyone, which is actually one of the other perfect positions.

In terms of, yeah, it's a great bit of casting.

The second I saw her pre-interview before she'd even been selected, I was like, oh my God, they've got to pick her.

She's so sort of coolly impressive.

And she, despite Jonathan Ross becoming a producer, she was almost like the most producer of all, that's not actually an adjective, of all of them.

Produce a real.

Yeah, it is now.

Of all of them.

I live my life producerially.

Okay, but you've got to calm down to Alan Carr just having to

just sort of i mean she's really impressive i'll be interested to see what happens with her so she is yeah she she is a great traitor i think jonathan might be a bad traitor because he's but you know so the one thing about it that's going to play out interestingly i think is in the normal traitors you work out the status after a sort of week or so people kind of find their places and you know at first perhaps the older people are the ones with the highest status and then after perhaps then the people who are good at the tasks have the highest status.

In this, we instantly know what the status is.

Every single, the one thing you know about every single celebrity that has ever lived is they know exactly where they stand in the ecosystem of celebrity.

You know, each and every one of them could take all 19 names, rank them in order of the most famous to the least famous, and those lists would be almost identical.

from all of them.

So you go in knowing that.

And that gives you two different things.

Immediately, it means there's two groups of people I think is hard to murder straight away.

The really famous people,

because everyone there is a TV producer, really.

And they're going, do I really want to get rid of Stephen Fry?

I don't really want to get rid of kind of one of the biggest names there.

I keep him in.

They also know who is at the bottom of that status list.

And they go, we can't get rid of those people immediately.

That feels like bullying.

So you really only have a choice of about seven or eight people in the middle of that list.

The people who are famous enough.

All of which is so, such weak gameplay.

Yeah, but they're celebrities.

They're conditioned to play the game weekly, which I love.

It's much more watchable.

But they'll be conditioned to play it weekly for about three days.

And after like three or four murders, you know, and I've talked to various people who are in it, and everyone, no one would tell me anything.

But they all said, it is unbelievable how quickly you start just playing a game.

Does it get like the Stanford Prison Experiment?

Yeah, I think one one of those great sort of

fingers crossed.

Yeah, there is that.

And also, because it's going to last a shorter amount of time, I think the pace, again, will be quite claustrophobic and it will pick up quickly.

Because, as you say, in the civilian version, that might take

sort of a week of stuff, but it will come quicker in this for definite.

But this idea, so we don't know who the first person to be murdered is.

So we can all make predictions on that.

It might be slightly random because, of course, Alan has to physically touch somebody.

So, it might be someone who's just in front of him at any given time.

But I love Kat and Jonathan just saying, No one will.

Jonathan's like, if I touch someone's face, it'll be creepy.

Cat Burns going, I mean, I never touch anyone.

It's like touching people at the best of times.

I'm certainly not going to be doing that.

And they're saying to Alan, I mean, Alan, of course, of course, you would touch someone's face.

But to his credit, he knew immediately that it had to be him.

Yeah, he was like, you know what?

Oh, God, I do have to do it.

So he has got to wander around that house, find

somebody to touch.

I think that's a gender-neutral thing.

I think Alan can...

He was totally appalled at how loud he was talking about it.

He is an absolute liability.

There's nothing better than the early days of the traitors having an absolute liability as a traitor.

And especially when it's Alan Carr.

As I say, you're used to him being in control of stuff and in charge of something.

To see him genuinely unravel, and because he's a comic, he unravels in a very, very funny way.

Very amusing way.

At the very start of the next episode, which is tomorrow, he he is going to get rid of somebody it's going to be very interesting i know who that i don't think it'll be any of the the really high status ones i don't think it'll be any of the lower status young the young the younger ones essentially by lower status that's what i mean the people who are you know on the more on the nursery slopes so

i will cry with laughter but it won't happen yeah i enjoyed i enjoyed nick being better at um all the brain puzzles and the uh quizzes about shakespeare than stephen fry but doing it in such a low-key way of course See, Nick is a Nick Muhammad

people just know him from Ted Lasso or something.

Nick Mohammed is a genuine genius.

So when I used to go and see his Mr.

Swallow shows, and he would do like maths puzzles and stuff and genuinely do them and do these incredible feats.

And yeah, if I'm doing something there when there's one of those slidey things, you just have to say to everyone, everybody, sit down, let Nick do it.

He said at one point, this is an awful lot easier if it's just one person doing it.

And he's the politest man

in the whole world.

He's just saying, and by the way, he started the whole thing by digging Celia's grave for her, if you know what I mean.

Yeah.

He's just saying,

honestly, it's going to be easier if you just let me.

I should have let him do the Shakespeare one as well.

Oh, yes.

Let's talk about Claire Balding.

You know, I love Claire.

I love Claire.

Claire was my house captain at school, and then we all voted for her to be head girl, and we all loved her.

And that's how long I've loved Claire.

She was not my house captain at school.

I do live quite near Claire.

Yeah.

And she is the joy of the

one of the greatest human beings.

She's absolutely hilarious.

She is a delight in every way.

And also, it's exactly the sort of person to go, no, I'll put it in the answer.

Don't worry, I can do that.

I can do that.

And the mistake that she made, the mortification.

I can't bear it.

I could not bear it.

We had to look away.

We were like.

It was awful.

Because she and Tom Daly, sports people, had organized themselves.

Had organized everyone so well.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, Tom Daly's one to watch.

So people who put their heads above the parapet, I don't think it matters so much for this murder that's about to happen because there's a randomness to it.

I think if there were a murder happening, okay, should I murder Claire?

So Claire's put her head above the parapet by making that mistake, which could be seen as deliberate.

We know it's not, but it could be.

So you think, oh, great, we'll get rid of Claire.

But of course, if you're a traitor, you're thinking, oh, no, the faithfuls will get rid of Claire.

Let's let them do that.

We get rid of an absolute wild card.

So if they were doing it normally, I mean, if you got rid of Joe Wilkinson, everyone would be like, huh?

What's happening there?

What have they done?

It throws everybody for an absolute loop.

The thing about having to touch someone's face, it takes all of that out of the equation.

So it has a randomness.

I genuinely don't think he's about to touch Stephen Fry's face.

I genuinely don't think he's about to touch, you know, Nico Omilana's face.

He seems lovely, by the way.

Nico Omilana.

I can't see anyone there.

They've cast well.

There's no one you think, oh, good, they've put someone deliberately annoying in.

They've gone, no, no, we love this show.

We're going to put in people who love this show and who people are going to love as well.

I will say this, I think we can predict it's going to be an amazing series and there's going to be twists and turns.

And we know that these first three traitors are not going to end up being the three traitors because that's never the case.

I mean, it'd be very hard to sort of run the whole show, go, you know, the whole way through as a traitor.

Doable, but hard.

So as you say, it's going to be someone who's recruited at a later point who's probably already proved for a fact that they're a faithful.

And, you know.

It's possible for her to do it, it for cat to do it if she's because she has

anyone can do it yeah but purely because she has the chops for it and she comes across funnily enough she comes across in an incredibly non-celebrity way yeah if i can yeah yeah that sounds like a sort of generalization you know like that is is a truly selfless good deed possible it is is a brilliant uh celebrity game player possible yeah it's it's hard to see it i mean the other people that i love i love celia of course and i've worked with her recently and see

you said and she was saying this in real life she said my thing is, everyone thinks I'm lovely, and I'm just not.

But she says it in such a lovely way with such a lovely face, everyone's going, oh, but come on.

So she's the sort of person if you Joe Marlowe, I thought, was terrific.

Joe is great.

He doesn't look about it.

But there's more going on there, and people might underestimate that.

Yes,

I think so.

But

if he were ever recruited, I think he'd be.

I think he might go to pieces if he was recruited.

I think that he might.

I think the burden might be to.

I think he has a real sense of justice in his soul, Joe.

And I think he might find it quite hard to be recruited.

But we know that a few of them will be recruited.

And, you know, if you recruited Celia, for example, then, you know, if you recruited Nick, he needs to hide the fact that he's incredibly smart.

He's probably the smartest person there in terms of just

human nature and stuff.

Our stable mate, David Olishoga, has just been on.

He's not bad, is he?

Yeah.

Again,

people might not be so familiar with what he does

because it's not such an obvious celebi thing.

He might adopt that kind of

father figure.

You know how people, there's always what they have them every year in all the civilian series.

And so he could take that role of people thinking, you're an authority figure.

Once Stephen Fry has gone to pieces and been voted out, I'm joking.

Yes, because I feel like Stephen doesn't quite have the personality to be father of the house.

Neither does Jonathan.

So when you go down the list, who's the next?

Mark Bonner, does he have the thing?

But then David Olashoga, isn't it?

i just want to say i love mark bonner yeah you know it's not to do with the point about traitors it's just i love you mark bonner but what if he's about to have his face touched oh my god see he's but he's in that group of eight in the middle i think i think he is that's uh that's that's that's at risk i would say that

um is there anyone we missed missed out because i just want to make sure that we've covered everyone ruth i loved lucy beaumont didn't do much in that episode so you sense that listen this is just the editor in me that maybe she's not going because we haven't you know you would have seen a bit more of her if she was the person who was going to go.

It's like when you watch.

Charlotte Church puts her back into things.

Charlotte Church does it.

Oh, Charlotte.

Literally.

Charlotte Church.

Yeah.

I mean, what if, yeah.

God, you could see Alan touching Charlotte Church's face.

She'd be such good value at the round tables, I'm afraid.

Oh, my God.

You'd have to see that.

But that's the problem.

There's nobody here.

You think, oh, great, there's some dead wood here.

Just get rid of person X.

All of these people, I want to see.

what they do.

Oh, no, Charlotte Church is a really good one.

She's got the most potential to say exactly what she thinks at a round table.

Yes, which is.

In quite a non-celebrity way, which is really what you want, because you just want people losing their minds.

And also, by the way, Celia will do that.

Yeah.

And Celia, because, again, she looks like...

She'll always have control.

Celia, I don't know if she will, because Celia, it always looks like butter wouldn't melt.

I tell you now for a fact, it would melt.

I mean, it really, really would.

And if she wants to be mischievous, then she will be...

mischievous.

So I hope that she sticks around for a wide as well.

But genuinely, I thought, what an absolute treat.

It was everything I wanted it to be.

This is a series.

You know how, like, in when it's James Bond and you've got all the trainers or Marvel and the actual physical trainers go on the interview circuit as well.

Can we find out some more about the drivers?

It is a beautiful piece of driving.

I mean, neither of us drive.

No.

So I'm so

difficult.

I'm assuming what they do is very difficult.

How are they driving through that portal?

Sorry, can the Land Rover drivers be put on the circuit?

Because I think that...

No, but they did.

It's a lovely piece of driving.

But it all makes it, it's so camp.

And obviously her outfits, the stylists, there's so many things.

Because we haven't even mentioned Claudia.

Yeah, but we know, but all the things that people used to just sort of think were part of television are so foregrounded in that show.

Like the craft of the games and the sort of stunts of it,

the cinematography, you can almost call it that because it is so sweeping.

The stylist, which I mean, no one used to talk about stylists for television.

You know, all of this sort of stuff, it really does foreground lots and lots of craft to do it.

Because the game at heart is so simple.

Yeah.

And so

you have enormous noise.

Of course it's flawed.

I wonder what the twist.

They'll have a new twist that we haven't seen before in the final stages of that that won't be

the ones that we've had in previous series.

And the other thing that struck me, which is, and weirdly, it's something that you get from crime fiction as well.

If you're writing crime fiction, the thing you have to do is hide your clues.

So you have to hide that you've given away the solution.

You have to hide where it is.

And crime fiction readers are very smart at spotting when something's slightly out of place.

and but it's very easy if you can write a joke people don't notice because they're laughing and they go I understand why that's in there because it tells a joke

same in this is if you want to do these very serious conversations about but are you a traitor and you would say this if you are funny if you can do a joke you can immediately block out any line of questioning you want to do so I think if you're a comic it's like if say Joe Wilkinson was a traitor he'd be a great traitor halfway through he would find ways of you could ask him something and even if he realizes he's about to be caught out in a lie which happens a lot

he would work out that he could say something funny and the conversation moves on i loved it i hope we can do um as it goes on a couple more of these and certainly before the final one we can we're going to be unable to control ourselves we're going to have to do more of these it's just nice to be able to talk about it straight off the

it's not really a news item but let's keep doing it yeah yeah let's keep doing it um thank you so much for listening everybody thank you to our members if If you are not a member, this is a free one.

And anything we do on Slave Traitors, we'll make free because I think it's a big show.

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But thank you for listening to this one.

We'll see you everyone for our regular question and answers edition tomorrow we'll have calmed down by then we will have calmed down will we next we've got another episode to watch straight after

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