There was another shocking exit on the hit BBC show tonight no one saw coming
A much-loved player went from hero to zero on The Traitors tonight as she failed to persuade contestants to vote for traitor Rachel Duffy. So she instead went “kamikaze” and banished herself from the game.
In unprecedented scenes, former criminal barrister and crime writer Harriet Tyce, 52, was unable to convince the others Rachel was lying, and so urged them to “vote for me” and then take her advice once she confirmed she was a faithful exiting the game. The stunned players took her words literally and she left the BBC hit series with a massive 10 votes, having seemed one of the strongest remaining contestants last week.
Harriet told them: “What I am interested in is a win for the faithfuls. Now you can clear this up once and for all by voting me out and have me stand there and then I say that I’m a Faithful, at which point you will realise what I am saying has merit.”
After the vote she added: “Its a kamikaze move. I appreciate that. But I wanted to ensure you all knew who I really was. It seems to me that this was the only way I could get rid of any doubt over what I have said. I’ve given you the names, do not let this sacrifice be in vain. I am a faithful.”
The result means the two traitors, Rachel and Stephen Libby, survived another day. And like banished Fiona Hughes before her, Harriet lost her position in the game when she risked going head-to-head with the formidable game player Rachel.
Speaking afterwards, Harriet insisted she had no major regrets about her passionate speeches at breakfast and the round table which included revealing her real occupation and strong feelings Rachel was definitely a traitor, which some contestants felt was out of character.
She told the Mirror: “On the one hand, I’m gutted not to have got further. I haven’t won therefore I’ve lost so it’s hard not to see it that way, but on the other hand, I could not have asked for more action!
“I was given some opportunities there, I created other opportunities for myself and as I said, Faithfuls have very little control. In all of that I managed to find a way of fighting as myself and leaving on my own terms and I really don’t think many other people who’ve been through the game can say that. If I were to swap with being there in the final but being duped, I’d take my short-lived game any day.”
She added: “My game plan blew up but it is what they say it is… ‘Everyone’s got a plan until someone punches them in the face’. The idea was to go in as the nice lady with the jumper who was not a published author. Not too much on anyone’s radar – the invisibility cloak of the middle-aged woman and just try and keep my head down and watch what was going on.
“Unfortunately, because of Hugo, I was triggered into action there. I was then able to merge back relatively easily from that which surprised me because people weren’t being observant enough. They should have killed me when they had the chance.
“So, until the Smoke and Mirrors Mission, I think it was working very well, but it was hard to allow myself to be underestimated consistently. I didn’t really enjoy that even though I could see that it served a strategic aim. I think that with Smoke and Mirrors, it was just too irresistible an opportunity to let myself be myself properly and to stop letting anyone play me for a fool.”
After winning a prize in the Smoke and Mirrors Mission, Harriet was allowed to ask the Traitors two questions and had told them she was onto Rachel. But her over zealous accusations afterwards seemed strange and suspect to other faithfuls.
Referring to her decision to disclose information at breakfast, after she had been allowed to ask two questions, she explained: “I didn’t want the Traitors to have a single piece of information on me that I hadn’t shared with my fellow Faithfuls. You have very little control in that environment as a Faithful and I was bloody well going to control my own narrative and not give that to anybody else. People could choose not to believe me, but I was not going to leave anyone the opportunity to spread lies about me before I had told the truth.”
Asked if she would have done anything differently she said: “I would have tried to have been less emotional, but it’s almost impossible. I did the best I could with what I had; other people might have done a better job, strategically other people might have lasted longer but I’m still very proud of myself. I demonstrated integrity and as it turned out that’s something that’s really important to me.”
She admitted it had been a spontaneous decision to put her own neck on the line in the round table.
She explained: “It was halfway through after Matt made his accusation against me and I started to defend myself with some force. I was really going to give it a go and then I thought; you know what? I don’t want to do this. It was the first time I’d been under suspicion in two weeks, and I didn’t like the feeling.
“I was a very useful distraction for the Traitors, so I would be kept in this state of having my wings pulled off. It just became clear that the kamikaze departure was the way to do it. Suddenly all the tension left me, and it was a relief after so much high emotion.”
Harriet’s disastrous ending, when she also accused faithfuls Matthew and Roxy of wrongly being traitors, was a complete contrast to her heroic earlier efforts when she calmly explained at a round table that Hugo Lodge was a traitor. Her reasoning won contestants over and there had been delight when he was unmasked.
Looking back at that moment, she said: “It was a very exhilarating moment and something I realised in retrospect was the fact that I was fighting for my 25-year-old self who was a pupil back in the 90s dealing with male barristers of a certain age, some of whom were considerably less well behaved than Hugo. I think that I was taking one for the team and driving something I felt needed to be driven, and even though I knew I was putting a target on my back by acting in that way, I knew that it was the right thing to do.
“Me with my arms in the air – oh it was glorious. Such a good feeling.”
She said appearing on the series had made her realise she was “capable of more than perhaps I think I am”. She added “I need to trust my intuition because my god my intuition was on the money!”
Tomorrrow(Thursday) we will find out the result of the latest murder by the traitors. It was looking most likely they would try to kill Jessie, Adam or James but some of them had shields thanks to the Fountain of the faithful mission.
* The Traitors continues on Thursday and Friday on BBC1 and BBC iPlayer.
Source: Mirror
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