The Traitors

I wonder if you, like me, still have television programmes that you like to watch when they are actually being transmitted? I know that my daughters and their families never do anything so quaint as checking the online Radio Times as I do every day in order to decide their viewing for that evening. But I still love to plan what I might watch and, for instance, every Monday I really look forward to Mastermind, followed by Only Connect and then University Challenge. 

And for the past four weeks I have been glued to The Traitors at 9pm every Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, even though, for the most part, I found myself shouting “how can you be so stupid?” as The Faithfuls failed, yet again, to root out the perfidious Traitors in their midst.

It occurred to me as the series ended last Friday that ‘The Traitors’ is the perfect programme for this moment in history because, to enrich yourself by scooping the £100,000 prize pot you have to perfect the art of being a self-serving, manipulative and an unashamedly bare-faced liar. 

The premise of the game is beautifully simple. As with any reality television show, a ‘cast’ of around 25 people, presumably carefully chosen from several hundred applicants, is transported to a very grand castle in Scotland where they will have no contact with the outside world and no means of distracting themselves during the day other than to complete a challenge to ‘earn’ money towards a prize pot and to bond with, and ultimately to back-stab, their fellow contestants at an evening ‘round table’ at which, after a majority vote, one of them will be banished from the castle ‘forever.’

On their arrival they reminded me powerfully of a group of work mates chosen for their company’s team building week. They were all being super-nice, trying their best to create a positive initial impression and extremely impressed when they saw the castle for the first time. When host Claudia Winkleman appeared, in full Goth hair and makeup and a costume which veered between country gent and Cruella DeVil, the whole group nearly wet themselves with excitement.

As someone who used to play the Claudia role at residential team building events, albeit without her interesting wardrobe, I would have been delighted by that initial enthusiasm. I would have harnessed that positivity and excitement to increase commitment to their organisation, to foster cooperation between different departments or individuals and to build morale. At the end of their time together my intention would be to send them back to their organisation having bonded in ways that would enhance their sense of belonging which, in turn, would increase both their performance and enjoyment of their workplace and their role within it.

But this is a game played for money called The Traitors, so the objective is not to bring out the very best traits in human beings but the very worst. To work well as a television reality game show, Claudia needs people to gradually become more and more paranoid and suspicious of each other, to whisper about each other in corners, to seed doubt about motives, body language and trustworthiness so that by the end the handful that remain are so stressed and discombobulated that they have lost all sense of who might be telling the truth. However much you want to believe that the other people are your faithful friends, after days of lies and back stabbing, it’s become the law of the jungle, the survival of the fittest and every man for himself.

After such a positive, uplifting and excited start, how has it come to this? Via a destructive process of secrets and lies. At the first evening’s round table, Claudia has blindfolded everyone so that she can silently squeeze the shoulder of three of the group. These three have no choice but to accept their role as The Traitors. Everyone else is now a Faithful with no power to control events outside of their ability to repeatedly convince the others of their trustworthiness. To maintain an atmosphere of gothic horror, the three Traitors wear green cloaks with huge concealing hoods and, every evening after the round table, they secretly gather like the witches in Macbeth to gleefully wield their power to decide which Faithful they will murder (banish) that night.

The reason that the programme has been garnering audiences of 10 million or more is down to the fascination we all have with observing human behaviour and imagining how much cleverer and more perceptive we would be in the same situation. But, would we? As the audience, we have the massive advantage of knowing who the Traitors are. We have also got our favourites amongst the Faitfhfuls and the ones we secretly hope will get the chop. We know that Charlotte’s Welsh accent is fake and that Barbie Leanne isn’t a nail technician but is super strong and fit because she’s in the army. As a grandmother I loved Freddie, the handsome baby-faced twenty-year-old politics student whose sobs when he was being relentlessly and unfairly accused of being a traitor were heartbreaking.

The finale was probably the best that the producers of the show could hope for once their new ploy of giving one of the remaining six people the special power of being a Seer in order to discover the true identity of one of her fellow contestants, had back-fired. Unfortunately for them, Frankie, a Faithful, chose her best friend Charlotte assuming her to be a rock solid Faithful so that together they could work out a strategy to identify and banish any remaining Traitors. In fact she chose the only Traitor still in the game and, despite Charlotte’s tearful and anguished denials the next morning, she was fatally exposed and summarily dispatched by all the others at the evening round table.

That just left four Faithfuls, Frankie, Alexander, Jake and Leanne who, if they had all trusted each other, worked as a team and refused further banishments, could each have shared a quarter of the prize pot - just over £24,000. But it was far too late for cooperation. The paranoia and distrust engendered by the game led them all to decide on further votes to banish because, according to the rules of the game, if there is one Traitor left standing at the end, he or she alone would scoop the whole prize pot.  

This is what happened last year when Harry The Traitor won £100,000. Instead we had Jake and Leanne left when Frankie and Alexander were voted out. There was so much false and baffling logic in their banishments - Frankie must be a Traitor because Charlotte was a Traitor and Alexander must be a Traitor because, well, someone so smart, handsome, likeable and kind surely just has to be and anyway, blah blah and so the justifications went on. And they were completely, utterly and absolutely wrong! But never mind because both Leanne and Jake had voted out their rivals for the money and were therefore rewarded with a half rather than a quarter of the prize pot.

Screening of the end game of The Traitors happened to coincide with the inauguration of the President of the USA, and it occurred to me that the programme is very good at testing your worldview and your beliefs about  how human beings can and should behave towards each other. 

Do you think that this devious and Machiavellian game of winners and losers accurately reflects the real world in which relationships are viewed primarily as transactional, in which you should trust no-one, always act in your own self interest and the devil take the hindmost?  If you need to cheat and lie, so be it. If you need to pretend to be trustworthy and then stab people in the back, so what? In this world the rules of the game, including the rule of law, are optional to someone with enough money, power or chutzpah to be above them. Altruism is a mug’s game because everyone should be playing the game of life to win.

Or perhaps, like me, you see the world through a different lens? One in which you have taught your children and grandchildren that relationships of all kinds are never purely about short term reciprocity, but are also about mutual cooperation, mutual trust and mutual benefit? That lying is wrong and, as people, we need to be reliable, trustworthy and follow through on our promises and commitments? That a rules based system backed by laws has helped the human race to move past the ‘dog eat dog’ ruthless phase of development to a deeper level of understanding that without compromise, negotiation and some kind of ‘win-win’ outcomes, then we are all doomed to suffer the consequences?

It has often been said of the newly inaugurated President that his dealings with people are predominantly transactional rather than relational because he values reciprocity and loyalty much more than friendship. For the next four years, the person leading the most powerful country in the world is someone who made his name in a reality television show - The Apprentice - which, like The Traitors, values and rewards transactional behaviour and has only one winner. 

I suspect that in the game of life, the 47th President has always cast himself as the Supreme Victor Ludorum, which, unfortunately, casts all of the rest of us as either Faithfuls or Losers. Unfortunately, unlike The Traitors, this is not a game. It’s deadly serious.

Tricia x

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