Celeb Traitors #3. The big dogs vs the cat, banshees, farts & what Claudia wore next.

[CarefulN0w]

Carrying on with the love for the two Joes.

@bluevalley but from her perspective he was lying and it’s really easy to why she thought that. She also had Clare backing her up that the conversation happened.

I also think he did lie at the roundtable. He took the deny all knowledge approach rather than a misunderstanding approach to protect his position as a traitor.

FFS I’ve never seen so many people so bothered about someone accusing someone of being a traitor, when they are actually a traitor!!

I don’t think I’m a fan, he is some famous that I have seen on the tv a lot, but he didn’t say what Ruth thinks he said. He’s denying the conversation because as far as he’s concerned he didn’t have a conversation where he made an alliance with anyone.

Well, she’s in her 20s, not British, so is unlikely to hold JR in the sort of esteem as UK contestants who either grew up with him on tv, or know him professionally, so one assumes she Googled him as presumably everyone on this series did with people they didn’t know (clearly Stephen Fry looked up Niko, for instance). And the chances are that one of the first things she found was an account of ‘Sachsgate’.

Which is not going to endear JR, who emerges from it as misogynistic, crass and tasteless, to a forthright young woman who suspects he is a traitor. which, let’s not forget, he is.

The ‘spirit of the show’ is trying to identify traitors, not ‘Be nice!

It’s not that he’s being accused of being a traitor, or that I’m ’a fan’ of his, rather that she was so aggressive and rude to him both directly and in the diary room. I would feel exactly the same way regardless of who was speaking that way and who they were speaking like that to. If it had been David speaking like that to Celia or Stephen saying it to Joe M, she was being plain nasty.

I think she's not very nice generally nothing to do with JR. She was taking it all much too personally. The Traitors were appointed by Claudia and are playing a game. They're not just naturally nasty.

I enjoyed her immensely initially. I am not talking about her being "uncomfortably direct" making me uncomfortable. It was the level of vindictiveness and spite and the resentment and contempt in her voice. It really was unpleasant to watch.

Exactly. There’s direct and then there’s rude. She needed to let it go.

This is interesting. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cj3z5yj4l60o

It is about how all the contestants know each other really except for Ruth and Niko.

Also I just remembered that Jonathan has a big celebrity Hallowe’en party each year, I wonder how that will go this year!

That's a lot of supposition.

The spirit of The Traitors is for people (the Traitors) to trick people (The Faithful). It's a game show. Everyone but a few get banished or murdered.

The spirit of this season is a celebrity cast who won't take home the money, and therefore have less riding on it than a regular cast, and most of whom are just trying to have a good time and putting on a bit of a show beind witty to give the audience a good time.

Watching a cast member spewing vitriol is not a good time for me as a viewer.

Ask yourself this: How likely is it that Jonathan Ross, who has interviewed celebrities on TV for decades and must know most people in the business, would need to make a day one, ride in car to venue alliance with a couple of people he's just met? It's a preposterous suggestion.

I don't know if they are allowed their phones, but usually they are not on these sorts of shows - so she can't have looked him up as you've suggested before the show, and been disgusted, etc, and then been in the car and been happy to form this fantasy alliance with him. It's basically an intelligence test at this point.

‘spewing vitriol’ really? She was pretty robust but that’s a bit of a reach.

I really enjoyed Ruth - I loved her confidence and the way she confronted JR was fair.

And she was right!

I agree with all of that, except one thing which I will get to, watch most of the cast, especially in the cabin in the woods task. They were laughing because they knew it was just fun and they were safe but also because they all know they have to make it fun for the viewer. It’s like Taskmaster, yes there could be an easy way to complete the tasks but they are all comedians, they know they have to make it fun and entertaining. As said above, someone being genuinely nasty to someone else isn’t fun.

The one thing I disagree with is being able to Google each other. Yes they don’t have their phones but on TRIE Richard said that they will have googled each other before hand which makes me think they were told who was going to be on it before they went.

But the point I'd made was - if she'd googled JR beforehand and formed the opinion that was suggested by the poster I was responding to, then she would not have been happily in this fantasy alliance with a man she felt that way about.

But ‘rude’ is pretty much the USP of normal series of Traitors. And often far less pleasant than mere ‘rude’.

As I said I’ve just rewatched the first couple of episodes of Season 1 of the UK Traitors, and it’s hard not to notice that the two people attracting the strongest immediate suspicion (right at the start, so no actual evidence, people just going on hunches) are an amputee who didn’t pick up her glass to toast when everyone else did (because her glass at the Round Table was on the side of her missing hand!), and an older black woman with a slightly odd, awkward manner.

And as regards Ruth’s personality, she’s only been an amputee for six years, after deciding to have her leg removed above the knee after years of unsuccessful surgeries from a football injury when she was 15, and she then lost her job as a barber and make up artist during Covid. I’m not sure I’d be a sweetness and light person after all that either.

She said that finally deciding amputate the leg meant that after years of pain and surgeries she was able to take advantage of opportunities and not be afraid of making a fool of herself when she started posting on TikTok and getting acting gigs.

I imagine she’s also well aware that she was cast in part because she’s an amputee. There’s been someone with a physical difference/disability in every UK Traitors season. The amputee and the woman (Meryl?) with achondroplasia in Season 1. Mollie with a stoma and a limb difference in Season 2.

I’m not sure that would make me want to be sweet either.

Good point. I misunderstood what you said there.

Ruth is attracting such ire because: misogyny. It’s not complicated. I personally love seeing a grumpy weird young woman publicly perform a complete rejection of the need to be likeable and people pleasing bullshit that the vast majority of women and girls suffer from (through no fault of their own!!). Also going head to head with a powerful older man. This is not easy to do!! I mean she did then get murdered natch. The fact it makes most people so cross and uncomfortable is the whole bloody point of why it’s so needed.

And you think Ruth saying, in the car, before they ever got to the castle ‘Well, Jonathan, you’re clearly an utterly shitty human being, traitor or faithful, from what I understand about you being happy to humiliate a you g woman who has had sex with your friend on the radio, by leaving tasteless message on her granddad’s answering machine. so keep the fuck away from me’ was ever going to make the edit?

On a BBC programme? When Sachsgate caused a record number of listener complaints, an Ofcom investigation, two major BBC presenters being suspended, several BBC chiefs resigning, a formal BBC apology to licence payers and a discussion in the H of C about whether the BBC was a socially responsible broadcaster?

Not anything the Beeb is going to want reference to in a light entertainment hit featuring national treasures.

I agree with all this. I thought Ruth was great, and whatever she said about Jonathan, I couldn't have found too uncomfortable as I can't especially remember it.

As I've said before, I can understand how both JR thought no alliance had been made (it hadn't, really, though the word 'allies' was used), and that Ruth felt betrayed. Both those subjective viewpoints can be truthful.

I went back and watched Paloma's exit interview. I love that she name-checked Ruth as I felt for Ruth when she'd said how much Clare had meant to her in the house, but Clare didn't mention her .

I also loved that Paloma saw through 'sweet' Tom Daley. A good judge of character as well as a fun person.

its more that I think her logic was fundamentally flawed. The car conversation was before anyone was made a traitor, and if JR hadn’t been made a traitor, I don’t think that would have meant he wouldn’t have voted for Niko. I think he’d have voted with the majority anyway. I don’t think he voted for Niko because he was a traitor. I actually think the more traitor-y thing to do would have been to stick with that “alliance” and try to get Niko and Ruth to believe in it and therefore in him.

Someone used flawed logic on the Traitors 😱 how did that slip through the production edit without an apology for the harm it would cause to the viewers, its normally such a good example of how to use reason and create solid chains of evidence 😂

I can't wait until next Wed, when there is something else to discuss besides Ruth, Clare and JR, and what each of them did or did not remember 🥱

Hear hear!

I agree with @SmallAngryPenguinWoman and can we now draw a line under the Ruth vs JR thing now please? Pretty please?

Here it is:

_

🙂

Yes, we're going round in circles with JR vs Ruth thing.

I hope we will see more of Nick, David, Joe x2, Charlotte and <<whispers>> Lucy. They haven't had much air time and I don't feel like we've got to know them very well yet. At the moment, it seems like the Stephen Fry and Jonathan Ross show.

Cat is brilliant as a traitor.

I definitely want to see more of Nick being featured - all i knew of him before was ted lasso, and i ended up quite liking his character by the end. He's clearly a very intelligent man. He was about to outperform Stephen Fry on Shakespeare before clare pulled the lever in the trojan horse game. I think. I can't be arsed to go back and check.