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With its cloak and dagger plots and gripping finale, The Celebrity Traitors became the biggest show of 2025 in the UK – but the new series of the regular version is even more brutal, the host Claudia Winkleman has said.
And as Kate Garraway might put it, audiences are set to be flabbergasted by a new twist that the producers say has been introduced to “change the conversation” around the regular version of the hit reality gameshow when it returns for its fourth series on 1 January.
The first season of The Celebrity Traitors brought new fans to the show when it aired in the autumn, with about 15 million viewers watching the comedian Alan Carr triumph.
So expectations for the return of the normal version – in which members of the public play for prize money of up to £120,000 – are high.
According to Winkleman, the new non-celebrity The Traitors “gets hardcore”. She said: “It gets very heated. We get some very juicy round tables. I love this gang because they play with their entire hearts … it gets really, really brutal.”
She explained that during the celebrity series, they tended to say politely, “‘No, no, after you’”, but, “That’s not how this one goes … they play it in an extraordinary way.”
Usually in television, producers stay faithful to a successful format. But, speaking at a screening of the new series, The Traitors’ producers said that the success of the celebrity iteration had added “lots of pressure” on the regular version. So they wanted to “change the conversation slightly for this season” and introduce a new element.
Mike Cotton, Studio Lambert’s creative director, explained that after The Celebrity Traitors, “we had parents coming up to us and thanking us for reintroducing them to watching TV with their teenagers and their children.
“It became this big, huge family viewing event, which we didn’t really expect for a show that’s about murder and lies and betrayal. But obviously then there’s lots of pressure [put] on to the civilian version.”
He added: “I think with celebrities all the viewers automatically knew who those people were; they knew why they were funny, they could easily connect with it. And when you go back to our regular version, these are people that you don’t really know – you’ve got to learn to love them.”
“Which is also why we did the [the new twist] because we thought it would change the conversation,” said Cotton. Hints about what the change is were dropped in a trailer for the show on Christmas Day that featured a red-cloaked Traitor.
Since The Traitors began in 2022 fascination with its macabre missions and Winkleman’s outfits (this series her fashion inspiration is “full Oliver Twist”) has grown.
Cotton revealed that all the coffins are made locally in the Scottish Highlands, where the programme and its US counterpart are filmed, and at Ardross Castle, where the game is played, there is a “weird death museum” housing props from previous series such as the coffins and celebrity heads – which then get recycled.
The Traitors has prompted interest in group psychology, and Studio Lambert’s chief executive, Stephen Lambert, said in August it made him question how juries work.
The justice secretary, David Lammy, recently revealed a plan to reduce the number of jury trials in the UK, and Cotton said, “People do say the round tables are like a jury” and while it was “fascinating” how some players “become so convinced someone is a Traitor based on little or no evidence whatsoever … unlike actual court cases the faithfuls aren’t ever presented with all the evidence to decide if someone is guilty or innocent – they are instead relying on trust and instinct”.
The Traitors starts New Year’s Day at 8pm on BBC1 and iPlayer.
