How ‘winter madness’ made The Traitors the defining cultural event of the year

You know who the real Traitors are? People who aren’t ill. Since I got the flu 100 years ago (last week) I’m now deeply suspicious of Well People. You know the ones – they wear outdoor shoes and don’t have a rattling, wheezing cough that sounds like Keith Richards smoking a bong. 

The Well People are really getting on my nerves at the moment. They’re everywhere: skipping about, running, pounding the pavements with colour in their cheeks. And they’re on TV, too, radiating with health, running around the grounds of country houses, trying to exhume people from coffins. They have plans, they have dreams and their brains aren’t made of porridge. They wouldn’t dream of trying to take a paracetamol while already sucking on a Hall’s Soother, or falling asleep in front of Murder, She Wroteon a Tuesday afternoon.

Still, it turns out that spending over a week malingering on the sofa in a fugue state, looking like Nosferatu’s mum, is no impediment to participating in this year’s most defining cultural event. No, not the inauguration of the orange buffoon – I mean watching Linda from The Traitors pretending to be surprised. 

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After all, what are we all doing this month, anyway, apart from marvelling at Claudia Winkleman’s inky, silken tresses and theorising about all that Scottish country house skullduggery? Nothing, that’s what. And being ill has given me a lot of time to ruminate about The Traitors, consume Traitors content and watch The Traitors: Uncloaked. There’s not one micro-celebrity’s opinion I haven’t considered from every tedious angle.

It’s funny because part of me, rather traitorously, I suppose, couldn’t really give a toss about it.
I mean, when it’s on, it seems like the most important thing in the world, the single most significant televisual moment since the moon landings, but really it’s just a lot of boring people sitting around a table. I often wonder what it must be like to be on the show, becoming massively famous in the first month of the year and then completely forgotten about the moment it ends. It is the January Sale of reality TV stardom. It’s how it must feel to be a PureGym membership or a discounted Mo Farah Nutribullet.

I mean, be honest with yourself. Will you remember Leanne in January 2026? Will an image of Alexander singing a backwards haunted doll nursery rhyme come to you while you’re washing up in 2035? I doubt it. Personally, I only have a very vague memory of Amanda from the first series. And I’ve just had to actually Google who won it last year (Harry!) I mean, OK, Diane and the poisoned chalice of rosé was fairly legendary for five minutes, until the memes ran out of steam. But life moves pretty fast, and by the time the summer season rolls around and Linda, Charlotte and Minah are doing personal appearances at Big Boyz Niteclub in Brighton, everyone will be struggling to remember who the hell they are.

But that’s the way of it. It’s winter madness, to get us through the worst month of the year. Maybe it’s my fragile state, but this series already feels like a fever dream, and we will emerge blinking into February, brushing our cloaks off and looking ever so slightly embarrassed.

Hopefully by then, I will have recovered, too. Keith Richards will have gone home, and I will be back in the realm of the Well People, able to function properly and hold normal conversations without drifting off into space. Until then, though, if somebody told me that I was actually a Welsh nail technician who is also in the army, I wouldn’t be in the slightest bit surprised.

Catch up with The Traitors on iPlayer. 

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