At points, this year’s show has been repetitive, ropey, even blood vessel burstingly annoying – but it pulled it out of the bag with those blazing final showdowns

If you’ve been following The Traitors, you will already be aware that it hasn’t exactly been a vintage series. What felt fresh and exciting last year has now become slightly rote; something not helped by an intake of contestants who seemed to have been chosen based on their innate annoyingness.

One problem is that they all kept saying ‘yourself’ instead of ‘you’, which is a harrowing thing to have to hear over and over again for a month. But the bigger problem is that everyone is wise to the game now. Almost every contestant rocked up to Andross Castle with a honking great sense of self-interested superiority. And maybe that would have been fine, if it hadn’t made them all atomically insufferable.