He deserves to go down in history! How did Alan Carr pull off this stunning victory over celebrity traitors? Traitors

toLooking back, there has only been one winner on The Celebrity Traitors. True, Jonathan Ross may have had all the excitement of showbiz, and Joe Marler had the aggression of an unfed Labrador – but when you look at the series as a whole, you have to admit that Alan Carr was the only worthy victor.

That much was evident in Thursday’s final climax, when Carr pulled off a feat so brazen that it almost became performance art. This was a man who had spent the previous eight episodes attacking contestants — gleefully killing them behind their backs, or in two cases, when he looked them straight in the eye — and not only avoiding defeat, but also convincing his fallen enemies to calm him down. This is a skill level that only a true champion can achieve.

Carr’s victory was complete. Within the confines of the castle, he managed to avoid detection almost completely. This in itself is a miracle, given the talkative blundering of his first moments as a traitor. Of the three chosen in the first episode, he emerged as the undisputed weak link.

Jonathan Ross was the chatty veteran, honing his easy chatter over a five-decade television career. He was funny, persistent, and apparently such a huge fan of the show that he could see several moves in front of anyone chasing him. Cat Burns, on the other hand, was a mysterious unknown. She had no real personality to exploit, and by her own admission had difficulty working in large groups, so she was always destined to fly under the radar.

Meanwhile, the moment he was chosen as a traitor, Alan Carr began to tremble and hyperventilate, his eyes darting around the room as if it were no one’s business. At first he seemed destined to go up in flames like Linda from the third Civil Traitors series; A beautiful woman who was so genetically incapable of keeping any form of secret that she literally burned herself out at the first opportunity.

But then Celebrity Traitors did something really clever. Very early on, I had traitors kill believers in plain sight, by touching their faces. While the other two protested, Carr stepped up, sealing Paloma Faith’s fate forever by brushing an invisible hair from her cheek. The fact that he was killed so early – and that his victim was one of his closest friends, no less – encouraged him beyond words. It wasn’t long before he took on the mantle of a traitorous gang leader, and became impatient to keep as many people away as possible.

If we look at this in broad daylight, it is brutal behaviour. From one angle, the story of Alan Carr is the story of a man who was given a modicum of power and then became unruly and bloodthirsty. It is a pantomime retelling of the Stanford prison experience. But the thing that made Karr such an incredible traitor was that he managed to mitigate all of this with a whole host of magic.

The prevailing theory among believers this year is the Big Dog theory; In essence, if the show had the traction to book famous people like Jonathan Ross and Stephen Fry, it would be reasonable to assume that they would be traitors. The big dog theory of both Ross (correctly) and Fry (incorrectly) did so at the right time, while Carr avoided scrutiny altogether. This is because very little about him is outwardly aggressive. While everyone else was hunting the big dogs, Carr was using the little puppy theory, and winning big things.

But let’s have a little perspective here. Carr didn’t win just because he was a good traitor. It also won because believers were collectively the most helpless group of people to ever grace a television screen. This was a game with three traitors, and it took the faithful seven episodes to find one. Statistically, they would have done a better job of writing everyone’s names on some sticky notes, then playing Pin the Tail on the Donkey.

Stories will be told about how useless the faithful were this year, and how Kate Garraway and David Olusoga evaporated all the authority they had built up over decades in the business by pursuing the stupidest line of inquiry at every turn. These are the people who failed to catch Carr, even when he failed to say the words “I’m loyal” without bursting into nervous laughter. They are fools, one by one.

So Alan Carr was always going to win The Celebrity Traitors. But he did it with such joy, and such enthusiasm, that it deserves to be recorded in history. Good luck topping that next year.