BBC's The Traitors is coming back – and this time it will be for real

Just when you thought the cape-swishing, murder and betrayal were over, a new series of The Traitors unfurls on January 1, but this time round there’s not a celebrity to be seen as ordinary mortals are given the chance to lie, cheat and stab each other in the back to win a shed-load of cash. It’s a breath of fresh air.

Call me jaded, but there are only so many celeb shows you can watch – and believe me I watch them all (well, it’s great telly: Celebrity Race Across the World, Strictly, I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here, Celebrity Bake Off, Celebrity Watch Paint Dry) – before you forget what you’re watching and wonder why the protagonists in this latest crime drama are so clueless.

How I long for a few unknowns, faces you don’t recognise off the telly, people with some actual skin in the game for whom winning the money would be a life-changing moment, someone who’s a carer for a family member who wants to make their life easier or someone who wants to escape the cycle of slum tenancy, or maybe even just have a holiday. There’s nothing like being skint to focus the mind.

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Claudia Winkleman at the launch of BBC's Celebrity Traitors earlier this year (Picture: Ian West) | PA

Sirs and dames

Obviously Celebrity Traitors is great for the charity that receives the winner’s prize pot, but being celebrities and presumably not on a minimum wage – as well as receiving a rumoured £40,000 to take part – kind of takes the urgency out of their part in the proceedings.

That and the fact that a lot of the ‘national treasures’, sirs and dames, are already pals so their guard is down and/or they’re deferred to because they’re supposedly super brainy/male/popular and like to expostulate about tactics and theories and lead all the dafties off down a clueless cul de sac (at least Kate Garraway was honest about not having a scooby).

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Or they’re just used to being flattered. What, Jonathan Ross and Alan Carr were being disingenuously nice. Duh, it’s their job.

Sometimes on a 'sleb' show there are a couple of contestants I don’t know and I revel in their obscurity. “Oh, brave new world!/ ‘tis new to thee”, as Tom from the latest I’m a Celeb could have said.

Fresh meat

But then one of my offspring will inform me they’re a streamer with ten trillion followers and how can I not have heard of them, they’re class, quality, bangin’, no bad like, and my bubble is burst.

So fresh, unknown meat, bring it on. People who are suspicious of being smiled at or appreciated “just for being me” (that never happens), who know a spraffer when they meet one, who are not accustomed to hanging about Buckingham Palace being whacked on the shoulder by a royal with oversized cutlery, and will hunt those Traitors down.

We expect great things from the non-Celebrity Traitors – and if the winner goes on to become a household name who later appears in Celebrity Traitors as television eats/murders itself, well, I’ll watch that too.