Claudia Winkleman: male contestants couldn’t handle smart women on The Traitors

Claudia Winkleman has said she thinks male contestants were consistently chosen as Traitors on the eponymous BBC game show because men feel “threatened” by smart women.

In The Traitors a group of contestants compete amidst twists, turns and deceit for the chance to walk away with a huge cash prize.

In the second series of the show that was launched to huge success in 2022, two men – Paul Gorton and Harry Clark – and one woman Ash Bibi were initially picked to be traitors out of the line-up of the contestants.

But Bibi was later banished and a trio of men succeeded her.

“Another man, good, it’s like the olden days,” Winkleman, 52, told the contestants in an episode in January.

Now she has told The Guardian: “Maybe I shouldn’t have done, but I just had to say it.

“I was like ‘Come on, boys, what you need here is a really smart woman’, but they were threatened by them.”

The Traitors meet in secret and decide who to eliminate while staying undetected. Meanwhile, the aim for the Faithfuls is to banish all of the Traitors before the game ends.

British Army engineer Clark took home the £95,150 prize pot in the most recent series after he deceived model Mollie Pearce into thinking he was a Faithful.

Strictly Come Dancing host Winkleman will return to screens on the second series of Channel 4’s The Piano, alongside renowned pianist Lang Lang and pop star Mika, as judges.

But she insists she could never learn a musical instrument: “I’m so unmusical, I once sang to Mika and Lang Lang and they made me sign a piece of paper promising I’d never do it again.”

A visually impaired 13-year-old girl named Lucy won the competition, having impressed the judges with her rendition of Debussy’s Arabesque.

Winkleman has inspired fashion trends including the return of the fringe and tartan skirts. Yet she said that with all her success she is “allergic to praise”.

She told The Guardian: “I think it’s both a female thing and an age thing. I absolutely love telly… but it’s only work.

“I’m a big believer in impostor syndrome. I try not to revel in successes because it’ll go.”