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Alan Carr has won the BBC show The Celebrity Traitors, the most-watched TV programme of the year so far.
Viewers were eagerly anticipating whether traitors Cat Burns and Alan Carr or faithfuls Joe Marler, Nick Mohammed and David Olusoga would win the £87,500 prize for charity.
Burns was the first to be caught and banished in the vote with Marler the next to go. The three remaining players, Carr, Olusoga and Mohammed, voted to end the game, when the comedian revealed himself to be a traitor.
The final challenge involved a steam train journey where the contestants had to retrieve five gold bars in 20 minutes before the train exploded.
They managed to escape and add £20,000 to the prize fund before the explosion.
Carr’s victory concluded the first celebrity version of the BBC reality gameshow. Only one of the three non-celebrity UK series was won by a traitor.
The series was notable for the ineptitude of the faithful. Only two traitors were banished; in the each of three non-celebrity series there were five traitors banished.
Earlier on Thursday, the finale was released online more than 24 hours before its UK airtime. Viewers in Canada reported being able to view the episode in its entirety before it was pulled by the television network Crave.
Before the final, Burns said she did not believe she was a good liar, despite having avoided suspicion until the end of the series. The singer-songwriter was chosen to be a traitor alongside Carr and Jonathan Ross.
Appearing on BBC Radio 2’s Breakfast Show, Scott Mills asked her if the show had made her realise she was an excellent liar.
Burns replied: “I don’t think I am though. I don’t think I am that great of a liar.
“My mum watches me and she is like: ‘I can just tell that you are lying.’ But that’s the fun of the game isn’t it?”
Ed Gamble, who hosts the show’s companion programme, Uncloaked, said he considered the viral moment of Celia Imrie’s show-stopping fart to be the highlight of the series, joking it had “altered the dynamic of guffs”.
The comedian told BBC Breakfast: “I know there’s so much more that goes into this show, it’s such an incredible team, it looks beautiful, these huge, sweeping shots of the beautiful Highlands, but there’s nothing funnier than a fart, especially when it comes from a national treasure.
“Maybe in the future we will see more open farting followed by a swift admission.
“There will be no need for ‘he who smelled it, dealt it’ from now on – Celia has altered the dynamics of guffs.”
The programme had an average of 12.6m viewers across the first four episodes.
