Claudia Winkleman has a very nerve-racking job at the start of each series of The Celebrity Traitors – selecting the Traitors at the roundtable.
As the stars sit around blindfolded, the host slowly prowls behind them, poking the stars who’ll be “murdering” their fellow contestants on the shoulder during the selection process.
All the while, she is trying not to make noises with her movements that could give away who she has selected, and she occasionally taps her shoes on the floor to throw people off the scent.
At a BBC screening of the hotly anticipated new season, which arrives on BBC One tonight at 8pm, executive producer Sarah Fay revealed the one thing Winkleman is not allowed to wear at the roundtable: “Claudia is not allowed jewellery when we do the Traitors pick. We’re very strict on that, in case it jangles.”
Winkleman admitted that she “gets scared” and “panics” during the Traitors pick, adding: “I have to wear spiky, noisy, scary shoes. I feel like I’m doing flamenco because I stop a lot.”
The fringed star has made headlines for her fabulous outfit choices over the course of the show. She is often seen clad in tartan, indulgent knitwear, chunky boots, and oversized coats.
Speaking at the screening, she described her style on the series as “human crow meets golf caddie meets the artful dodger”.
This year, actor Richard E Grant, presenter Maya Jama and comedian Romesh Ranganathan are among the contestants competing to win up to £100,000 for their chosen charity. Meet the full list of contestants here.
One of the contestants, mathematician Hannah Fry, revealed how she’ll be using a genius maths method to try to win the game.
Self-described “toxically competitive” Fry, who teaches at the University of Cambridge, told the BBC she had gone back through all previous seasons of the show to “try and find statistically significant patterns” in a process not dissimilar from “the same bit of math that Alan Turing used to crack the Enigma machine” – a cipher device used by the German military during World War II.
She revealed that she had identified a pattern in the way that the assigned Traitors behave, including the fact that they “often do a burn vote” in the first few episodes when they’re settling in to throw suspicion on somebody random.
Fry called it “just one example of a little bit of maths that I’ve got in my back pocket”.
The Celebrity Traitors airs on Thursdays and Fridays at 8pm on BBC One.
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