A nice problem to have

7.2m overnight for the Traitors final last night, and 4.8m for Uncloaked immediately afterwards (surely making it the highest rating chatshow effectively of the modern era). Incredible. The main show will certainly be over 10m in +7.

And this leaves the BBC with actually a bit of a problem I think – at some point this year we’ve been promised a 9-episode Celebrity Traitors. How do you schedule it?

We’re presuming the application closing date of February means they’ll be filming US, UK and Celebrity a few months earlier than they tend to and let’s allow for three months for editiing. Let’s presume that January is sacrosanct now for Civvy Traitors, where do you put Celeb Traitors? Late Summer/Early Autumn feels like you’re not getting best audience value out of it as it’ll still be warm out. Autumn means Strictly is also on which risks over-exposing Claudia. I suppose I’m a Celeb tends to finish early enough in December that you could run it the weeks after, Christmas up the castle and end on Christmas Day which would be the most fun but runs the risk of overexposing Claudia and the show presumably starting a week later.

Not many easy or obvious spots really. Of course they could do it weekly as a slow burn, and you could probably get away with that and Strictly on at the same time if you did it that way, but the audience has been conditioned to expect it three times a week now. Could you get away with changing momentum?

It’s a nice problem to have. And in 2026 there’s another problem, in that New Year’s Day is a Thursday, so if they want the New Year’s Day bump that worked so well this year they’re going to need to rearrange what they do with it, unless they believe (possibly correctly) they can just wait until the following full week to launch it.

What do you think? Let us know what you think they’re going to do in the comments then next year we’ll find out if you have been CLEVER or STUPID.