Siobhán McSweeney stands in a courtyard flanked by hooded figures in flowing robes. There’s a big castle behind them with burning torches around it and Irish wolfhounds frolicking on the grounds. It’s a typical Sunday night for her, I should imagine.
But lo! Some strange ritual is taking place. Suddenly the robed figures flip back their hoods and remove their masks: it’s Michael D Higgins, Colin Farrell, Bibi Baskin, Mr Tayto, Martys Whelan and Morrissey, Enya, that guy from the RTÉ news footage who slipped on ice, Anne Doyle, the Morbegs, Pint Baby.
Yes, it’s the nation’s national treasures, the secret rulers of Ireland, and Siobhán McSweeney is being inducted into their ranks. She takes one look at them, raises one of her perfect eyebrows and says, icily, “No, I’m grand.”
Siobhán McSweeney is now the host of The Traitors Ireland (RTÉ One, Sunday, Monday and Tuesday), thank God. She could definitely take Claudia Winkleman, host of the UK version, in a sarcasm fight or even an actual fight, with tridents and nets, if the various broadcasting authorities would permit it.
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They both have idiosyncratic hair – hers a punk quiff, Winkleman’s a glossy black helmet – and they both specialise in deadpan putdowns. But McSweeney is superior because her raised eyebrow is, I suspect, sentient; she wears robes, cassocks and Elizabethan ruffs as the mood takes her; and she’s from Cork – and when you’ve been put down by a Cork woman, you stay down.
It has to be said that having a horde descend on a stately manor reads differently in an Irish context from a British one. They’re certainly just a few pikes short of an insurrectionist mob in the eyes of the marquis, who is watching from his safe room – RTÉ has requisitioned Slane Castle as reparations – particularly when at least three of the people have entered the competition to get a “deposit for a house”. (I give it 10 years before people are competing for food and water.)
After a few days at least some of them must be thinking, “You know, a lot of us could just live in this house.” In a week this programme will be rebranded as RTÉ Solves the Housing Crisis. (The format also reads differently in a country where having a group of people figuring out if there are moles in their midst isn’t usually played for laughs.)
The contestants are from a wide selection of Irish society. There are casino managers, content creators and models/gamers – everyone you’d need to start society anew. They’ve all filmed cutaways in which they turn to the camera sinisterly. If we have this technology it should be on our passports. And that’s the platform on which I am running for president.
The competitors include Eamon, who decides not to tell people he’s a garda, lest they think he’s some sort of Sherlock Holmes, in the process misunderstanding the place the Garda Síochána holds in the national imagination.
Faye, an event manager, utters the words “It’s so bougie” on entering the castle, in the process misunderstanding the word “bougie” and how the class system works.
Andrew, a civil servant, is shocked to discover that his father, Paudie, is also in the house. Many of us have had similar experiences with our taciturn fathers. They decide to keep their relationship secret, although Andrew has a habit of shouting “Daddy” at Paudie in moments of stress. The others presumably think it’s a sex thing.
Eventually the traitors sit around a big round table blindfolded, and Siobhán McSweeney circles them like the apex predator she is (a Cork woman) placing her hand on the shoulders of the three who will become Traitors. They are Paudie, who’s a prison officer, Eamon, the garda, and Katelyn, a leadership consultant.
I feel like these choices are a form of social commentary. At night, when the others are dispatched to their lodgings, this trio don robes, meet in a dungeon and take a mystical oath to traitorous behaviour. It brings me back to my Irish Times interview.
Later they are given a literally Sisyphean task. All 22 contestants are asked to roll barrels up from a brook to a brewery. It’s an exhibition of teamwork and a demonstration to the owners of this place that there’s life in feudalism yet.
On Tuesday they must use Irish-language skills to translate ogham stones. I call this task “the Leaving Cert”.
On Wednesday they transport gold on behalf of the clergy. I call this task “Most of the 20th century in Ireland”.
The first “murder” victim is Dave, who roused enmity by being good at remembering names. Classic Ireland. Siobhán McSweeney takes Dave’s portrait from a wall of contestant portraits and throws it casually over her shoulder.
“He was like a son to me!” Michelle says of Niall, who she has known for a few hours and who is murdered on Wednesday night. These people don’t have a great sense of proportion.
My favourite character is Eamon, who is being radicalised before our eyes. “I’d enjoy it a lot more if I could just do the murdering and didn’t have to seek permission from others,” he says, a big smile on his happy little face.
Sporadically, the Faithfuls gather around a round table and try to work out who the Traitors are. They’re terrible at this, because it’s not actually something a person can be good at. Some fans believe the programme to be a game of skill and strategy and not just the random weaponisation of groupthink and paranoid pattern recognition that you get in any office, school or newsroom.
They think they can tell liars from truthtellers because of notions of normative behaviour learned from emojis. In reality humans are a pack of weirdos who do not respond to anything the way you expect. And so, here, people are deemed suspect for making a joke or being too serious or being too emotional or not emotional enough or talking too much or talking too little. You know, crazy witchfinding bullshit. That’s why it’s fun.
And so they collectively dispatch an innocent radio presenter called Diane and a financial director named Nina based on vibes. I think I hear off-camera gunshots.
“Hello, darlings. I have some bad news. I’m dead,” Liz Hurley says via video testimony on The Inheritance (Channel 4, Sunday). I knew Liz Hurley would end up haunting us from beyond the grave. I’ve been saying this for years.
And now here she is with the glamorous pallor of death, inviting a bunch of regular folk who have come to another stately mansion to vie for her “inheritance”. The executor of her will is roundy-eyed, toothy law person Rob Rinder, who thinks this is a regular probate case and doesn’t realise it’s on television.
The trick in this game is that players must convince everyone that they alone deserve to get all the loot they collectively win in each episode. This means that people say things like, “Be the best or at least make people think you are,” and this “is definitely going to make me look like I’ve contributed really well to this request,” and “I’m smashing this. Now I’m getting everyone’s attention!”
Basically, it’s workplace culture in the 21st century. Who among us hasn’t accidentally said these things aloud at the office? All the broadcasters are looking for the next high-concept format such as that of The Traitors. When they came up with this high concept they were very high indeed.
