WATCHED - The Traitors

I'm aware that what I'm about to say is not a viewpoint that is commonly held. None of us likes to believe we live in a bubble, but in one way or another we all do. Mine involves avoiding some modern TV reality game shows. This began with Big Brother in 2000, and my current must avoid at all costs are Squid Game and The Traitors. I do this largely because I distrust, or find distasteful, the essential unethical and crude exploitative underpinnings of them. So I've placed myself outside of all this charade, looking on from my very own semi distant bubble, and to be honest remain baffled and appalled. 

I'm not unaware of how huge popular The Traitors is. How can you avoid all of that? The answer is you bloody well can't. It's like someone drip feeding wine into the veins of a reformed alcoholic. You will watch this, because it's your duty to.  I have only viewed an episode or two when Hubby and I have been with his family at New Year. Whilst I have found this happenstance instructive as to how it actually operates as a game, it has not substantially changed my opinion. I still find the format makes me grimace, and suck through my teeth. Even as I sense its attempts to get its sticky tentacles around attaining my own active involvement in its machinations. I do have a clearer sense now for how the programme panders to the worst in us.

There are subtle methods by which it gently softens you up to receive it. This is largely achieved by having a popular presenter up front, like a sort of loveable mischievous Auntie.  Claudia Winkleman's magic is spread like homemade jam all over it, her charm and emollient presence renders whatever is to follow perfectly acceptable  This also allows the viewer to be drawn unquestioningly into engaging with the format. Set it in beautiful countryside, in a magnificent castle, it's all set to support the Scottish Tourist Board

Programmes such as The Traitors points you towards reflecting upon where our country might currently be at. To our straightened financial times, to just about surviving, to where making money is more important than how it's earned, to how our moral compass appears to have been misplaced, to living out a fantasy in the age of stupid.  People engage here with the execution of deceit. Who contestants say they are may be a total lie. The choice of contestants, the type of person they are, hasn't happened by accident. This is not just about being encouraged to fib and dissemble, contestants are chosen for how they fit into particular character types, to which they are then goaded to play up to. This 'game' is then played out so one of them to win a huge amount of life changing money. Your asked to be convincingly yourself, no, sorry fake a convincingly hyped up version of yourself. To use dissimulation to climb to the top for this pile of dosh. The game plays it's own small part in legitimising the social collapse of trust, and it's dependence upon the unfettered individual pursuit of greed, widely active in the world outside of it.  Nothing is metaphorically out of bounds on The Traitors. you have to be prepared to murder to get access to that pot of money, via the round table mockery of a jury, which is often nothing more than an apologetic lynch mob

This process is an absolute minefield sociologically on people's ability, or more often clumsy inability,  to judge the motivations of other people. What people will do in order to gain money. This is only a reality game show, I have to keep reminding myself. It is both serious and facile, and that is meant to throw you off the scent of any qualms you might have. Never forget Traitors is now a valuable format with huge international reach. Some contestants try knowingly to game and second guess the format, with not much success. No matter how confidently they expound their sleuthing abilities to be. There's a lot of puffed up braggadocio on show, which is all the more pitiful when this falls flat on its face. 

Unanalysed mistrust fills the airtime. Clichéd views about men, women or people of colour hover like a malevolent shadow beneath the surface all the time. An inability to examine their own motivations, let alone those of others, becomes jaw droppingly apparent. It's a parody, nay a veritable pantomime, of real life opinionatedness. To massively take out of all proportion a small oversight, a stumbled word, a moment of embarrassment, the wrong time to look away or consider their groin. Major tantrums are thrown entirely for televisual effect, to improve ratings.

I understand how this so easily becomes addictive light entertainment. That's why I'm so proactively resisting watching it. Indulging as it does in a comforting voyeurism, you self identify with particular contestants, laugh and sneer at the sheer stupidity on show. And feel moments of faux superiority because, after all, you've known all along who the traitors are. Meanwhile the contestants flounder around in stately comfort, swimming in an over heated pool of contrived deception and lies, trying to correctly ascertain what is really going on. 

It's a two dimensional puzzle game involving real people, cultivating their worst motivations, to create extremely good viewing figures. No one learns anything remotely useful from this entire process. Everything is as lightly glossed over as the staggering expense of Claudia Winkleman's wardrobe bill. Wherever you look, at whatever level you view this format from, you find a grubby commercial venality. The Traitors is perhaps then the perfect mirror for our time, it's like watching a ship sink in slow motion.

There, that's my Mary Whitehouse moment over with.

CARROT REVIEW - 2/8