Right, Week One Tuesday 9:30pm, Wednesday 9:15pm, Thursday 9pm, subsequent weeks I don’t know, roll a dice or something.

BBC1

The three episodes for the week go up on iPlayer after the first episode of the week. Got it? Not after week one they aren’t.

Finally Studio Lambert’s interpretation of Dutch success story De Verraders makes its way to BBC1 in a scheduling style that’s extremely confident but could yet end up being quite a long month if it doesn’t work out very well.

The Traitors is two-games-in-one really. The main narrative is basically a game of Werewolf writ large – 22 people arrive at a Scottish castle, three of them are designated Traitors, the other 19 are The Faithful. The Traitors have to work as a team to eliminate The Faithful one by one so that they outnumber them in the end and claim the money for themselves, The Faithful must eliminate The Traitors but don’t know who they can trust. Every day everyone votes to banish a member of the group out of the game, hoping to remove a Traitor. At night, the Traitors come together and “murder” a member of The Faithful – perhaps they were getting too close to the truth, perhaps they’re a useful patsy. Very different from something like The Mole, we as the audience are in on who The Traitors are and can watch them scheme as they try and outmanoeuvre the crowd.

That alone isn’t going to fill twelve hours, so in between the shouting at each other there are challenges to win up to £120,000 worth of bars of silver gold coins (because presumably the kids are too thick to understand the Judas Iscariot allegory now) and they look exciting and spectacular. Again however, differently from The Mole all contestants are pulling in the same direction – all winning surviving contestants on the winning side will share in whatever the prize pot is.

I am a bit worried as to how they’re going to square the circle of Werewolf, a game that has no fixed time limit really – it could be over in three rounds, it could be over in eleven – will be parcelled out to fit an exact twelve episode order. I know foreign versions have tended to just add more Traitors if some get eliminated early, I’m not entirely convinced the British public will just let that go if that happens here. We also have quite unusual “hunt the show” scheduling – I know they’re going big on iPlayer with this, but surely if this really takes off you want everyone to be watching the final episodes at the same time for maximum impact. They’re giving this the best possible chance – the first episode goes out after England vs Wales at the World Cup, which should be a ginormous lead-in, and getting Claudia Winkleman on board lends it an air of “you trust me on Strictly, you can trust me on this” respectability on what might feel like quite a complex show initially. Studio Lambert have done The Circle and Race Across the World, so they’ve proved they’ve got some chops in this adventure reality area. I’m hoping it’s really good, but I can’t be 100% sure it’s going to be successful. It’s done pretty well in many territories, but it’s also flopped.

Let us know what you think of the show in the comments. We currently have a Traitors Chat channel running in the Discord for episodic discussion.

Tuesday, 10pm,
Channel 4

You won’t believe this, but I was so busy watching I’m a Celeb that this completely slipped my mind hence the late post. Ellie Taylor presides as a pair of people helped by professional interrogators try and work out which other person’s unbelievable story is true for £5,000.

I’ll try and find time to watch it over the next few days, but in the interim if you have opinions you can stick them in the comments.