Could Anne Doyle match Claudia Winkleman’s style as the host of the Irish Traitors?

It’s been the perfect telly for the long evenings of January but with an Irish version in the pipeline, let’s hope producers don’t scrimp on what makes the show so enthralling

The Traitors Season 2 Official Trailer

Ann Marie Hourihane

January needs big telly and Traitors (BBC1) is big telly. As with Strictly, you can gauge its impact by how shocked fans are in the run-up to the final episode: we want Traitors to last forever. The conspiracies, the cloaks, innocent people banished or murdered, Claudia’s cashmere wrist-warmers… Traitors is value-for-money viewing.

Yet it is so simple that it is also a television joke. In the UK, they explain Traitors by saying that it is based on the children’s game Wink Murder but over here we would say it is an adult version of Murder in the Dark. A whole lot of strangers in a beautiful castle, with a big cash prize on the horizon, and a trial (called a mission) for the whole group in every episode to increase the jackpot. A few of them are secretly designated as traitors — that’s where the cloaks come in — whose task is to eliminate the good guys, known as ‘faithfuls’, so they can keep the prize pot for themselves.