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Claudia Winkleman’s fringe and tartan chic is the highlight of my week
The Traitors is one of the few things getting us through a miserable January. For three nights a week, it feels as if the whole country is living and breathing the cloaks-and-daggers drama.
For the other four painstaking days when the show isn’t on air, we’re sharing our opinions and theories with everyone from colleagues to strangers online.
But it’s not just tactics and contestants viewers are talking about – my group chats are incessantly pinging with questions about what happens behind the scenes, where the cast go once they leave the castle, and whether Charlotte will ever reveal her real accent.
Luckily, we no longer need to ponder most of these questions, as former contestants have been speaking to BBC News about the secret workings of the Traitors castle.
What does a typical day in the castle look like, and what happens before breakfast?
The order in which the contestants arrive at breakfast is a source of tension and speculation on the show.
Series one faithful Maddy Smedley explains that contestants are kept in separate holding rooms when they come to the castle in the morning and are called to go into breakfast individually or as a group.
Similarly, in the evenings, contestants wait in a holding room until a runner comes to individually escort them out of the building and into a car.
Traitor and series two champion Harry Clark says there are no clocks in the castle and contestants have no sense of time.
“You get picked up in the morning and when filming is over, you get dropped back to the lodgings,” he explains.
“I don’t know what time the mission starts or when lunch is – we rely on the production team to direct us and in between, we all just sit around and chat.”
Harry says there’s a lot less trust among the group this year after his deception in series two
Unlike the hour-long episodes we see, Harry says the days aren’t filled with wall-to-wall traitor speculation.
“I spent most the day talking to Paul about Liverpool and Chelsea or finding out if everyone believes in aliens and obviously that stuff doesn’t make the final edit because it’s not relevant to the game.”
Series one faithful Dr Amos Ogunkoya describes his days in the castle as “a really nice holiday camp, until the roundtable”.
“Most of the day we’re just learning about each others lives and so you become really close to everyone there.”
Matt Harris, another faithful in series one, says that, while the castle is huge, “you’re not allowed out of sight from the cameras so you can’t walk around the grounds”.
“They set up the rooms like the library and bar especially for the show and you’re told by producers which rooms you can go into.”
How long does the roundtable really last?
The roundtable can last hours according to former contestants
The lack of clocks make it hard to know exactly how long anything lasts but the roundtable surely far surpasses its 10 minutes of screen time.
“At the beginning, there are 22 people,” says Harry. “Even if everyone only speaks for 10 minutes, that’s more than three hours.”
As viewers, it can be hard to understand why contestants are so emotional during and after the roundtable, but Harry says it’s “really intense”.
“Everyone has their own story and you’re taking someone’s chance of winning money away if they are banished.”
Maddy says she cried so much on the show that “the security guards would give me ice every morning to help the puffiness of my face go down”.
Maddy says her favourite contestant this year is Linda
Where do contestants sleep?
The exact location of contestants’ lodgings remains a mystery to us, and apparently to the cast as well.
“It’s about a 30-minute drive from the castle but you’re blindfolded as you approach, so you can’t see the car in front or figure out exactly where you are,” Maddy says.
She explains that the whole
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