Yet this coveted demographic, who have been dropping out of the live television audience at an alarming rate, were turning on and tuning in to every episode of The Celebrity Traitors.
“The popularity of Celebrity Traitors has demonstrated that there is still an appetite for moments of shared viewing amidst growing audience fragmentation,” says professor Catherine Johnson from the University of Leeds’ school of media and communications.
“Research we conducted at the University of Leeds found that, for many viewers, television is an important engine for their social relationships – it’s part of what makes people feel connected to friends, family and wide society. These connections are felt not just in person, but also in terms of what we see being discussed in the media and on social media. People watch shows to maintain relationships with members of their household and to be able to participate in conversations at work so that they don’t feel left out.
“TV viewing is part of the way in which we connect to other people and to society more widely. It’s one way in which we feel that we belong.”
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As a format, The Traitors is now fully established. Each series has seen the audience increase, with just 3.74 million on average watching Wilf Webster and co, then 6.91 million tuning in to see Harry Clark plot his way to victory before 9.32 million watched Leanne and Jake take the money in this year’s third series. The celebrity cohort comprised every element of fame from bona fide national treasures to content creators.
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“The BBC managed to secure a stellar cast,” adds professor Johnson. “This was not one of those celebrity formats where you only know one or two people. This was a cast full of big names from sport, film/TV, social media, music, journalism – there really was something for everyone. And the cast really threw themselves into it, playing the game whole-heartedly.”
Corralled by Claudia Winkleman, they took the series to a new level.
With a new series of The Traitors coming to BBC One in January, there is no sign that we are tiring of the series.
“The show uses a classic cliffhanger format to encourage watching the next episode,” says prof Johnson. “But perhaps more importantly, these cliffhangers encouraged talk about the show between episodes: Who will they murder? What if the Traitors turn on each other? What would I do if I was a Traitor? And then there’s the production values: the setting, the design, the missions, the score, which makes the show feel more like a movie than a competition show.
“Combined, this makes for a series that not only made you want to watch, but also to share, and talk about, with others.” Such was the impact, that following Celia Imrie’s fart, national radio phone-ins had fart-focused mornings, leading to one that covered ground including how primary school teachers could help giggling children deal with gassy pals.
The show has quickly become a vital jewel for the under-fire BBC. Airing in the wake of the scandal that saw Gregg Wallace and John Torode sacked from MasterChef and in the same month director general Tim Davie and head of news Deborah Turness resigned over the Panorama edit of a Donald Trump speech, The Celebrity Traitors also provided a major boost. The younger demographic hooked in helped.
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During every episode an average of 3.4 million 16- to 24-year-olds made an appointment to find out what Claudia Winkleman was wearing, who Alan Carr was murdering, and whether the self-appointed brainiacs Stephen Fry, Nick Mohammed and David Olusoga could muster a single plausible theory between them.
Because this is a generation that relishes creative interactivity. The success of The Celebrity Traitors could mark one of two things: a genuine cultural shift back towards the collective communal cultural experience or a temporary blip created by a near-perfect entertainment format. More likely, though, it is an amalgamation of both. The Celebrity Traitors is a traditional appointment-to-view show, watched like a live sporting event, that demands both immediate discussion online and at school or adjacent to the water cooler at work the following day.
It is also thoroughly modern – ripe for meme-ification, created to be packaged up into tantalising clips that can be shared and discussed on social media. The whole hullaballoo is also made-to-measure to be analysed to death via its official podcast.
Traditionally, we look to the Christmas schedules for more opportunities for multi-generational communal viewing. But this year, the festive TV schedules are as bare as they have been for years. There is no mass appeal comedy comeback like last year’s returns of Gavin & Stacey (12.3 million viewers on Christmas Day last year, the biggest Christmas audience in a decade) or Wallace & Gromit (9.3 million on Christmas Day, which more than doubled on iPlayer by mid-January).
No Christmas Doctor Who until 2026 is another lost opportunity to bring families together around the gogglebox. There are Christmas specials of popular shows, from Mrs Brown’s Boys to Amandaland, The Masked Singer and All Creatures Great and Small and Call The Midwife. But none compels a complete cancellation of plans in order to watch it live, apart from, for the hardcore fandom, perhaps the three Stranger Things episodes dropping this Christmas.
But the big moment came at the end. And when Mohammed dropped the ball so spectacularly, it was as punch-the-air exciting as any last-minute winning goal, gold medal-winning lunge for the line or knockout blow.
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So all hail Nick Mohammed, who provided us with this year’s most compelling cultural moment. Even if it almost ended his bromance with Joe Marler.
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