'The Traitors (BBC One) is the Highlands Hunger Games. It is terrible - a pandering to our basest, most voyeuristic, atavistic instincts, an exercise in exquisite cruelty lasting 12 weeks. You’re going to love it.

'Like all the best tortures, the set-up is simple. Twenty-two people are taken to an isolated spot - a huge castle in the wilds of Scotland - to complete a series of tasks together that will increase the prize money (up to a possible £120,000), which will be split among the winners. Fine! Dandy, you might even think! Except that three of the contestants are secretly designated - by host Claudia Winkleman - “traitors”. They get to “murder” one person a night to reduce the competition. The group can eliminate one person a day. They must try to identify the traitors and get them out because if a traitor survives to become one of the prizewinners, he or she will walk away with the whole sum. Thus are the seeds of discord sown with a lavish hand.

'Somehow, I’ve made it sound complicated. It really isn’t. Not least because the rules are, in a sense, immaterial - all you really need to know is that the game has been ruthlessly designed to set individual against individual, exploit every inch of humanity’s capacity for suspicion, dissembling, paranoia, guilt, sociopathy and every other unpleasantness you can think of. The knowledge that there are three traitors in their midst is like a poison creeping through the group. But as it works on them, they must come together to do the tasks as a unified whole to maximise their profit. If the makers had had the balls, they would have called it Headfuck.' (Guardian article).