‘Hands over faces’: Behind the scenes with Celebrity Traitors producers during Richard E Grant slip

“We sat in the control room, watching from a distance, with hands over our faces, [thinking] ‘What is going to happen?’” Mike Cotton, an executive producer, told The Observer. 

“There are no producers in the castle talking to contestants or trying to shape the show. So we don’t really have any control over anything, except in the way we plan the season and the set pieces. And you couldn’t have planned for that.”

Executive producer Sarah Fay has also spoken out about the moment, and said the actor really did just “muck up”. She said they’ve never witnessed anything like that while making the show. 

She told Radio Times: “It was a mixture of a little bit of sick coming up in my mouth and a punch at the same time. We’ve never had anything like that happen before. I mean, within five minutes of being out of the roundtable, he’d already mucked up!

“I still can’t believe it now. But yeah, I mean, how iconic! And as producers, you always want to make sure the series are fresh and new. And we’ve been very lucky so far. We’ve just come back from filming our seventh series.

“We’ve just finished civilian, and every single series, luckily, the cast brings something completely different. But never in our wildest dreams did we think that we’d have a Traitor admit they were a Traitor five minutes after the roundtable.”

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