Professor Hannah Fry came under serious heat from her fellow Celebrity Traitors players during last night (9 October)’s round table – so could a slip-up in her defence speech come back to haunt her?
The mathematician and broadcaster, 42, was recruited as a Traitor by Maya Jama and James Acaster following the early banishment of actor Richard E. Grant.
However she has consistently raised the suspicion of the other players since then, and ended up as one of the top two contenders for banishment during episode four’s round table, alongside actor and Coronation Street legend Julie Hesmondhalgh.
Fry ended up making an impassioned plea to her fellow contestants to keep her in the game, telling them that they shouldn’t fall into the trap of singling out celebrities with reputations for “being smart”, as has happened in previous seasons.
And in a clever bluff, she also appeared to selflessly defend Hesmondhalgh, noting that she shouldn’t be picked out purely because she was labelled as the most trustworthy player in the first episode at the very start of the game.
“I’m cautious about everybody,” she declared. “The mistake that we see the Faithfuls make time and time again is they take the people that stand out, the most trustworthy, the people who’ve got a reputation for being smart… and then the Faithful kill them and then you weaken the Faithfuls overall.”
Her defence appeared to work, with the players eventually choosing to send Faithful Hesmondhalgh home, meaning that Fry has managed to buy herself some more time in the castle.
Viewers at home, however, were convinced that a small but significant slip-up made by Fry during that speech could end up sealing her fate and bring about her banishment in the not-so-distant future.
Her errors were twofold: not only did she refer to the loyal faction in the castle as “the Faithfuls” rather than aligning herself as part of that group, she also described the Faithful as “killing” players.
Faithfuls only have the power to banish contestants from the castle as a result of the round table vote, and it is only Traitors who can murder their fellow celebrities.
Her mix-up, then, might (correctly) suggest that Fry has murder on her mind as one of the three Traitors.
“How the f*** did Hannah get away with that at the round table?” one viewer wrote on Twitter/X. “Am I the only one who heard her say the Faithful would murder rather than the Traitors?? Wake up people!!”
“I hope every celeb picked up on Hannah saying ‘the faithfuls’ instead of ‘we the faithfuls’ or ‘us,’” another astute fan noted. “Digging your own grave.”
“I thought she was talking about previous years so she would say ‘the faithfuls’ but I did notice she slipped up and said the faithfuls KILL instead of banish,” a third chimed in, picking up on Jama’s reaction too. “Maya winced, but no one else reacted really,” they added.
Will the Faithful pick up on her mistake? We’ll have to wait until next Thursday, when episode five airs, to find out.