The Celebrity Traitors review – Ross Kemp really needs to get a grip

Warning: this article contains spoilers for episode one of The Celebrity Traitors.

So – have they managed to capture lightning in a franchised bottle again? The new series of The Celebrity Traitors, more hotly anticipated than Nigella entering the Bake Off tent, is here. Twenty-one contestants of varying levels of fame, but never dipping below C-list, have signed up to endure Claudia Winkleman’s tyranny in Ardross Castle, in the hope of winning up to £100,000 for their chosen charity and a place in the nation’s consciousness and possible heart for between one week and a lifetime, depending how things work out.

We get our first glimpse of the gang as they file into a church replete with masked guards and floral tributes spelling out RIP and VIP at the altar. Actors, broadcasters, comedians, musicians and some miscellanea start to fill up the pews. Young Sebastian Croft pauses to genuflect before continuing down the aisle, and such is the power of the format that you immediately wonder if this is a tactic to make himself seem trustworthy. Will it work? Or is anyone with a religious belief marked as a weirdo for whom anything is possible these days?

If you think that’s sensitivity gone mad, may I introduce you to Ross Kemp? Before the episode is out, he is turning bewildered circles in the castle, convinced that anyone who touches him is trying to murder him in plain sight. Get it together, Kemp. We’ve a long way to go yet.

But this is what we came for, of course. To see behind famous faces to the reality beneath. The hard man who is actually a soft target will do nicely. If mathematician Hannah Fry proves incapable of putting stats to work in her service, it will be noted. If Julie Hesmondhalgh (“I get hungry for friendship with people I see on the telly!”) turns out to be a Machiavellian genius, we will be over the moon. How long can they last in a game that is all about personalities before they have to reveal the true nature of theirs?

It’s about 30 seconds for Richard E Grant. Most people – apart from Hannah Fry (“I am dripping with prefect energy”) – want to be chosen as traitors. But Reg publicly longs to be chosen as a traitor (“It would be the jackpot!”). He is chosen as a traitor. He is asked by Joe Lycett whether he is a traitor. “I am a traitor!” he gleefully replies. A drama queen without guile. An actor’s actor. “Already iconic,” says Claudia.

Some choose to ignore this revelation – unprecedented in the history of either Celebrity or peon Traitors. “He’s just acting out because he hasn’t been chosen,” says Jerry Hall, who has known him for 30 years – and you can well imagine him doing so. But in this case, he has just exuberantly shared the truth. Much of his time in the extended opening episode is spent trying to walk it back.

His partner in treacherous crime is Love Island presenter Maya Jama (“My villain era has begun!”). Together, in one of the twists that any iteration of the series must serve up to keep participants and audience engaged, they must choose the third traitor from two people they haul in to plead their cases. The loser will be murdered (or, if you are one of the three people who do not know how the game works yet, “murdered”). They agree that they must choose two contestants who have taken Reg at his word and believe him (“I’m a traitor!”) to be a traitor. It’s between journalist Amol Rajan and comedian James Acaster. They wait in coffins – I am not a huge fan of this recurring motif, to be honest – to hear their fates, and we hear one of the lids bang shut as the credits roll.

So, the lightning – is it bottled? Not quite as successfully as last time. The law of diminishing returns is brutal in television. The cast feels slightly more muted – the energy is not quite there yet. But Claudia and her clothes and attitude are, and the opening episode of any Traitors outing is always the weakest. It is relationships and alliances that make the show, and they of course take time to build. Seeds have been sown (is Jerry Hall bossy? Is former army captain James Blunt about to reinvent himself as a national hero? Will Romesh Ranganathan and Rob Beckett’s real-life friendship be an asset or a liability?) and will flourish in due course. But it feels as if they are at work in ever so slightly less fertile soil this time round.