James Acaster was stitched up ...Middle East

This article contains spoilers for The Celebrity Traitors

Cast your mind back, if you can, to 1 October, when the Celebrity Traitors final was but a glint in Claudia Winkleman’s heavily mascaraed eye, and names like “Julie” and “Myha’la” were still floating around office kitchens. The country gleefully awaited the follow-up to what was arguably the highlight of 2025 – and then, straight away in episode one, something so funny happened that the hysteria continued apace.

Except that extremely funny thing set the course for the whole game – and, now we’ve got to the final after a bizarre and, let’s be honest, abortive penultimate episode, it’s clear that it wasn’t for the better. Richard E Grant’s early accidental confession – immediately after he was picked as a Traitor, he told Joe Lycett and the whole bar full of contestants that he was one – has led to a series that, particularly in comparison to last year’s exquisite, positively Shakespearean narrative courtesy of Alan Carr et al, has felt simultaneously a bit chaotic, a bit flat and ever so slightly “off”.

Last year, Jonathan Ross lasted seven episodes even though he was obviously a Traitor – some kind of subconscious groupthink kept him in, what with his charismatic presence and Big Dog status. He was eventually banished and bowed out with a flourish, having gleefully played his role. This is what Richard – whose naturally villainous energy made him an obvious choice, confession or not – could have done. But because he couldn’t keep his trap shut (a moment that was, granted, truly fantastic TV), the other contestants had no choice but to oust him in the first Round Table, making him the shortest-lived Traitor in the history of the show.

But beyond even Richard’s early exit, other factors early on in the series have contributed to James’s reluctance and ultimate confession, which has indisputably cast a shadow over the series as a whole. James was recruited in the first episode, while Richard was still enjoying the turret, in a savage process in which the Traitors picked two Faithfuls, one of whom would be recruited and one murdered.

Normally, Faithfuls are given the opportunity to turn down a recruitment – which makes the game more interesting at breakfast the next day, but also allows people such as James, who are manifestly uncomfortable with being a Traitor, simply not to be one. Plus, recruitments normally wouldn’t happen until later in the game, when the Traitors ranks had been depleted.

This was a lethal combination of factors. How were Maya and Richard to know that James was as desperate to be a Faithful as Richard was to be a Traitor? And how could James reasonably turn down the recruitment, when there wasn’t an immediate mechanism to do so, and it would have meant curtains after only one episode?

With these events in tandem, we were left with a bit of a bad vibe: by episode two, the Traitors were already one team member down, and half of the remaining team didn’t want to be there. There was a stilted dynamic between Maya and James from the beginning – it’s difficult to imagine two people more like chalk and cheese – and it all felt a bit forced. By the time they were allowed to recruit again, it felt like they had little choice – but then they chose Hannah Fry, after another botched challenge in which only she and Jerry Hall were on the slate for murder (one does wonder what would have happened if Jerry’s tolerance for discomfort had been a little higher – would nobody have been allowed to be murdered?). Again, this was a mistake: it was all too obvious, and Hannah lasted just one more episode.

Such a high turnover of Traitors has led to the team feeling unstable throughout – again, particularly compared to last year when Alan and Cat Burns had the whole series to bond. This year, after Hannah, the Traitors’ next recruit, Kenny, was a very smart one – not only because he has proved to be a fantastic liar and actor, but because he and Maya are already good friends. His presence has made the turret feel less like two colleagues who don’t know each other very well waiting for everyone else to arrive at the pub.

And so what with one thing and another – a major factor being simply a question of personality – James has been under immense pressure as he has tried to play a role he didn’t want to play. When he confessed at last night’s Round Table (a slightly dodgy edit that you suspect might be concealing some material the producers didn’t want us to see), it was, for much of the nation, shout-at-your-TV stuff; just like two episodes ago, when he refused to take off his blindfold to sneak around with the other Traitors in the challenge, it felt like unwillingness to play the game.

But you can also see why he would feel anxious, and be pretty miffed about the whole experience in general. If James and Amol had been up against each other later in the series, James might have chosen to bow out, not wanting to compromise his integrity as a Faithful; James still would have had a good few episodes on the show and Amol would have made a much better Traitor. And if Richard E Grant hadn’t been such a hopeless – yet enthusiastic – Traitor himself, the game wouldn’t have felt so disjointed, and the pressure on James, even if he had still been recruited, would have been significantly lessened.

“You can’t Richard it,” said James on the post-show podcast Uncloaked, telling Ed Gamble how he had subtly changed his language to tell the truth about the Traitors’ tactics and surreptitiously played both sides. But in the end, he did sort of Richard it – a straight-up Round Table confession that undeniably took the wind out of the sails of the game. It’s disappointing, but an appropriate callback to the beginning of the series, whose chaotic course has been set since day one.

‘The Celebrity Traitors’ finale is on tonight at 8pm on BBC One

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