JOANNE MCNALLY LIKENS CELEBRITY TRAITORS EVICTION TO MILITARY OPERATION

Joanne McNally has described being voted off The Celebrity Traitors as a "military" operation. The comedian was voted off the BBC show during the penultimate episode, broadcast on 29 October, after co-stars wrongly accused her of being a Traitor at the Round Table. Speaking to her co-host Vogue Williams on the podcast My Therapist Ghosted Me, McNally explained what happens once a player is banished. "So you get off the podium, they rush you out the side door and you're bundled into a van like Whitney Houston in The Bodyguard," she said. She said contestants keep an "emergency backpack" of essentials in the castle at all times, and are taken to a different hotel once banished.

McNally said she returned to Ardross Castle in the Scottish Highlands the following day for further work, including "B-shots", final interviews and footage of her in the bath. She said she had long wondered why bathroom visits inside the castle involved "this big kind of production". The procedure exists, she said, to ensure the castle is cleared of contestants banished the previous night but still completing filming. "So they were making sure no one crossed paths," she said. She added that the production is run "so military".

The comments followed remarks from co-star James Acaster, who said he "should have walked out" of the show before filming was halted. Acaster changed the course of the game during the same penultimate episode by declaring himself a Traitor at a tense Round Table. He did so after Michael Sheen pointed the finger at him and at Maya Jama. McNally had been part of the Faithful when she was banished at that stage of the second series.