It’s hard to believe that we’ve only had Celebrity Traitors for a year. The sight of so many famous people essentially on a team-building weekend is nothing short of mesmerising. It’s certainly compelled viewers: the first episode of this season was the BBC’s highest-viewed show since 2022, and it’s overtaken Strictly as its most-watched programme.

The Traitors franchise sums up the best and worst of group mentality, both in terms of viewership and how it reflects what we do. It elicits connection: everyone from my young niblings and teen godchildren to their grandparents is hooked. It’s appointment TV in the way linear TV does best. And nothing brings out British wit like second-screening Traitors on social media.

But my God, it also highlights our very lowest points, doesn’t it? Not least that appearances matter above all, especially when you haven’t got anything else to go on, and you’re unwittingly friends with the people holding all the cards. At its best, the round table is a game of Cluedo with everyone putting the pieces together. At its worst, it is the old medieval stocks, or being uncomfortably aware of not having been invited to something being chatted about in a school WhatsApp group, only you aren’t allowed to show upset at being singled out because it’s “just a game.”

Or, as the academic Alice Tarbuck summed it up: “I tend not to watch Traitors because if I wanted to experience herd mentality where in-groups police anyone who doesn’t conform to standards of neurotypicality, whiteness, intelligence and heterosexuality I could just look at my photos from primary school.”

Who's Deemed Suspicious?

Whether on TV or in real life, who gets a pass as a Faithful, and who is deemed suspicious, depends on variables that seem to change with the wind. This season, two men to four women (and we’ll soon find out whether Sharon or Joanne goes) have been banished at the round table: Joe Lycett, who’d publicly asked to be recruited, and Richard E Grant, who had delightedly told everyone he was a Traitor, seemingly forgetting that even Alan Carr, with his non-existent poker face, didn’t go that far. Both men had to basically put on a badge saying “Banish me!” unlike the women: most notably, Julie Hesmondhalgh, who had been voted most trustworthy in the first episode.

This season has seen herd mentality pushed to its limits. The team knows there’s a fox in the henhouse (three, in fact) but would very much rather pretend it’s not happening at all. Hence the extraordinary sight of all three Traitors being chosen as the team’s most trusted: and they’d nailed the behaviour, really, because passing as a Faithful is all about how you seem to be. Sharon being talked down by Romesh, Michael and Kenny, who apparently didn’t understand the way she communicates, let alone as a much younger, less confident, and arguably less powerful celebrity than the likes of Michael Sheen, felt redolent of so many experiences in the workplace, especially.

In my early 20s, I was working on a website primarily staffed by cheap young people. A deputy was brought in, who turned out to be so utterly useless that he had to be flanked by juniors at all times just to make sure he didn’t embarrass himself.

I was so staggered that this useless individual wasn’t immediately sacked that my grandmother, a stay-at-home Navy wife, had to explain to me how offices worked and that you can’t just be fired for not doing your job. Especially not if it would make higher-ups look bad for hiring him.

It’s not his fault: he clearly knew how to play the game enough to get hired. If you’re reasonably senior, drift along chummily enough and don’t rock the boat, you’re set. (When, years later, he turned up on the Today programme as a magazine editor, I grimly wondered who was doing all the work.)

Being a “clubbable” type (that’s the sort of chap you’d like to drink with, rather than hit with one) is very much how most people manage to stay afloat in social circumstances. You need to say the right thing to the right person in the right way and be prepared to wait for real change, and if you don’t have the right level of power, whether real or engineered, then you will likely remain frustrated, or have to wait for someone else to parrot it for you.

Think of Riana Duncan’s 1988 boardroom cartoon for Punch: “That’s an excellent idea, Miss Triggs. Perhaps one of the men here would like to make it.”

Groupthink: It's A Dangerous Game

Social media has given people a different sort of power: one that can effect real campaigning and change, but one where people who already have power crave yet more of it, through approval and followers. Witness the political shift in Silicon Valley from reasonably left-wing and open, to attending Trump’s second inauguration.

What makes it so dangerous is that it only takes one powerful person to lead the charge: from Elon Musk, who, as owner/despot of X, decides what gets coverage and therefore what is shown to masses of people, to JK Rowling, who posts about trans people far more often than about the many cases in the news of violence by men against women. One voice starts it, and groupthink perpetrated on social media does the rest.

The castle shows how it works in miniature. As Joanne McNally put it: “You want to be the Goldilocks of the castle. Not too much, not too little.” That Goldilocks herd mentality keeps a player alive, and it feels ruinously unfair when, with no evidence to go on, people just name someone who seems a bit off. Joanne herself refused to vote for Hannah, even though her gut said she was a Traitor. “We don’t think the herd mentality is useful,” she said. “But yet when someone doesn’t do the herd mentality, [you’re] under suspicion.” Ross, murdered in plain sight as he’d feared since day one, summed up the round tables on the Uncloaked podcast with a bleating sheep noise. All it takes is one wolf, or another sheep, to point to you, and you’re a goner.

Whether at work or in politics, there comes a point where the group is too embarrassed, ashamed, or scared to speak up publicly. But what we also know is that it can last for only so long before a reckoning comes. As we saw in Brazil’s and Serbia’s revelatory elections over the weekend, and may yet see in November’s midterms in the US, the group will always make its feelings clear: and ultimately, nobody is safe from banishment.