Richard E Grant has one hope of lasting on Celebrity Traitors: lean into his eccentricity

Genius or idiot? No one has played The Traitors quite like this before. Photograph: Euan Cherry/Studio Lambert/BBC/PAView image in fullscreenGenius or idiot? No one has played The Traitors quite like this before. Photograph: Euan Cherry/Studio Lambert/BBC/PARichard E Grant has one hope of lasting on Celebrity Traitors: lean into his eccentricity Stuart HeritageChats with inanimate objects, farting into Tupperware: this cornered animal must sell his confession as just another quirk

As we all know, The Traitors is a game of deception. The entire point is to conceal your true motivations in order to better carry out a series of murders undetected. This is the way it should be, and the way it always was. And then Richard E Grant came along.

Grant’s trajectory during the opening episode of Celebrity Traitors was as follows. Step one: be selected as a traitor by Claudia Winkleman. Step two: immediately tell everyone you are a traitor.

As a dumbfounded Joe Lycett pointed out in the aftermath of Grant’s revelation, nobody has ever done this in the history of The Traitors. The entire system works on a process of elaborate deduction based on a complex matrix of pattern recognition and gut instinct. This, as you will be aware, is much harder to do when the villain straight-up announces that he’s a villain without any form of coercion.

Immediately, you can see why Grant never starred in any episodes of Columbo. This is because his episode would consist of him walking up to Peter Falk, announcing “Hello there, I am a murderer,” and being arrested. It would be 30 seconds long. Nobody would watch it.

But let’s look at the positives here. By being so brazen about his identity, Grant has basically forced the game into a place it has never been before. Aside from Jerry Hall – a woman who I am beginning to suspect is wrong about everything – all the contestants this year believe Grant is a traitor. And so it is his job, and the job of his bewildered accomplice, Maya Jama, to frantically throw bodies in his path until suspicion drifts elsewhere. He’s a cornered animal, and they are often the most dangerous.

It also means Grant has to play into all his latent eccentricity, to make it seem that erroneously announcing himself as a traitor when he is in fact a faithful is just something he does. To sell it, he has to make everyone around him believe that this is just one bizarre character quirk in an entire ocean of them. From now on, he has to really sell his role as the mad uncle of the castle, by muttering to himself and having conversations with inanimate objects and farting into Tupperware. This is the only way he has any hope of lasting on the show.

The big question is how intentional this was, which is to say: was Richard E Grant a genius or an idiot for doing that? Certainly his horrified expression after admitting the truth seems to suggest the latter. And reactions on social media would reinforce that somewhat. Anyone who has watched The Traitors will know that drawing attention to yourself so early on is often a recipe for an early exit.

Anita Singh in the Telegraph called Grant “lord of chaos” while Emily Bootle in the i called his outburst “a cock-up”. “This is the only show that could be completely sabotaged in the first episode and for that to somehow make it even better,” Bootle added.

But if Grant can survive then he’ll have the freedom to move around knocking people off unbidden. For now, the spotlight is on him and him alone. Though who knows how long that might last.