Jerry Hall is still a contestant on The Celebrity Traitors, and Guardian columnist Stuart Heritage has argued that she should by rights have been eliminated — yet instead she has become the show’s “incredible agent of chaos”.
Writing in his column, Heritage said that if “there was any justice in the world”, the traitors would have “murdered her in cold blood” at the very start of Thursday’s episode, and that the fact they did not “speaks volumes about what an absolute legend the woman is”.
Heritage identified the moment he believed should have condemned Hall as occurring on last Friday’s show, during a mission in which each contestant was buried alive alongside a partner. Participants had a choice: wait to be dug up, or shout the word “haggis”, which freed them but left them eligible to be murdered. According to Heritage, Hall shouted “haggis” roughly a nanosecond after the game began. No other contestant did so, and the columnist argued that such weakness in the face of adversity meant she deserved to die.
The columnist went on to suggest the traitors may have made the right call in sparing her, arguing Hall works best as a source of chaos. While some contestants are playing chess and others “4D chess”, he wrote, Hall appears barely conscious that a game is taking place at all, treating the programme as an excuse to drift around blurting out whatever occurs to her.
He cited Thursday’s episode as evidence. Hall and Hannah Fry walked into breakfast together — a development that had been expected to see one of them murdered — and suspicion immediately surged among the other contestants as they wondered what had happened overnight to keep both women alive. Fry, Heritage wrote, grasped that she would come under scrutiny and responded accordingly, whereas Hall “wailed” the words “WHAT ABOUT RICHARD?” in the manner of “a newly grieving widow”, for no apparent reason.
Heritage said nobody knew why she had done it, asking whether it was a strategy, a ploy, or simply evidence that she “lives inside a bubble unaffected by simple things like causality or logic”.
He acknowledged that such behaviour was probably what viewers expected of Hall, describing her life as having been extraordinary by any measure. He noted that she spent the 1970s moving between Bryan Ferry and Mick Jagger, that she has performed at Glastonbury and been the Joker’s girlfriend, that she has judged the Whitbread prize and appeared in adverts for Bovril, and that she was married to Rupert Murdoch. Heritage suggested that anyone who had lived through all of that would be forgiven for inhabiting a self-made reality shield.
In his view, those same qualities make Hall a brilliant participant, pointing out that after a week and a half of being “abjectly wrong about absolutely everything” she still has the confidence to boast about having been a leg-wrestling champion in high school.
Heritage concluded that there is no telling how her time on the programme will end. He suggested the other contestants may, tired of her unintentional buffoonery, turn on her; that she might so confuse and beguile everyone that she wins outright; or that she might accidentally become a traitor and accidentally bring down the castle.
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