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“If it were a party, you’d be really happy about who came,” says comedian Lucy Beaumont. mold Britain’s first famous person Cheat settles in Ardros CastleThe Scottish home of BBC One’s hugely successful reality show. He is not wrong. Well done to the producers of the show, who have managed to accomplish the seemingly impossible and fill the available spots with truly recognizable names. you can practically hear strictly The team from the next desk is seething. Perhaps it’s a testament to how popular this game of deception, backstabbing, and using the word “yourself” in a way that defies normal rules of grammar has become since it debuted in 2022.
Stephen Fry, Jonathan Ross, Celia Imrie, Claire Balding and Tom Daley are among the famous faces who have headed to the Highlands to try to win up to £100,000 for charity. Unlike the civilian version of the show, there’s no real need for a long train ride sequence for the audience to get to know the cast, so our celebrities are driven up to the castle in a fleet of blacked-out Range Rovers, like a royal cavalcade, or an organized crime group closing ranks.
But instead of stopping here for some canapés and welcome drinks, as TV host Kate Garraway admits she was expecting, the celebs are immediately taken to a cemetery, where all the headstones, in particularly morbid form, are inscribed with the contestants’ names. Presiding over this solemn scene is, of course, the presenter claudia winkelmannDoes she tone down her unique brand of slightly risqué camp just because she’s now working with her TV colleagues? Absolutely not.
Essentially, the stars are tasked with digging their own graves, in the hopes that they will find a shield (with the power to save from the series’ first “murder”) buried in the dirt. “Personally, I wanted to be cremated and have my ashes thrown on the London Eye,” says alan carrIn the first of many jokes.
It’s quite strange to see a large group of recognizable people completely suspending disbelief and throwing themselves into the show’s horrific actions. Sometimes, when they’re all gathered together, looking cold and disheveled, waiting for Winkleman to give them some instructions, it seems as if we’re treated to some kind of celebrity outdoor activities vacation.
From here on out, it’s pretty much classic Cheat stuff, with the contestants returning to the castle so that Winkleman can choose which of them will wear the big cloak and gathering in the turret that evening, as a moody cover of “Wonderwall” plays. And in the next act, poor Balding arouses suspicion only because he’s bad at reading instructions, while Winkleman wanders around wearing frill sleeves borrowed from Captain Hook’s wardrobe.
There are so many big personalities vying for screen time in the first episode that it’s hard to figure out who is going to be a hit with the audience. But Carr is a constant source of hilarity, and when he’s chosen as one of the three traitors, his stage fright is quite amusing (“I’m worse than Linda!” he cries after almost finishing the game, pointing to season three’s most OTT traitor).
Fellow comedians Beaumont and Joe Wilkinson offer a more amusing, deadpan humor that is a pleasant contrast to the show’s dramatic plots, while ted lasso Star Nick Mohammed seems almost too good to be good at this game. His first step is to help 73-year-old Imri, already the elder lady of the palace, with the digging work; It’s exactly that kind of kindness that arouses suspicion in this show. And fries are, well, a lot of fries, dressed up with a Greek myth reference or a dash of Shakespearean wisdom.
In terms of how far they’ll go, all the celebs are so good at performing for the camera that, at this stage, it’s a little difficult to get a handle on their gameplay. And everyone is so committed to each other that you have difficulty even imagining their nuclear attack on the Round Table.
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Cheat Fanatics feared that a celebrity version would go against everything that made it so watchable. But, at least based on this opener, they have nothing to worry about — this new spin-off remains faithful to the show we know and love.