Richard E Grant is out of The Celebrity Traitors — and his fellow Traitors voted for him

Richard E Grant was banished from The Celebrity Traitors in the 8 October episode after an earlier slip in which he told other contestants he was a Traitor. The Press Association report carried by The Irish News says a majority voted for him at the round table, including his fellow Traitors Maya Jama and James Acaster.

Grant's verdict on his own game was blunt. After revealing his identity to the group, he said, ‘I am… an unfaithful traitor.’ Speaking to camera afterward, he added: ‘I have been annihilated. I have managed to checkmate myself, which, as far as I’m aware, has never been done.’

Why was Richard E Grant banished?

The answer starts with what Grant said before the vote. According to the BBC's account of the preceding episode, he blurted out that he was a Traitor to Joe Lycett, Rob Beckett and other contestants in the bar. That disclosure gave the group an unusually direct reason to suspect him. The later Press Association report confirms that the vote ended in his banishment.

Grant knew he had created a problem for himself. The BBC reported that he hoped the others might decide the admission was too stupid to be true, allowing him to get away with it. His position depended on the contestants treating his own words as some kind of misdirection, even as those words remained available for anyone at the round table to bring up.

Why did some contestants hesitate?

Not everyone read the admission the same way. The BBC reported that Myha’la thought Grant seemed ‘a little too easy.’ Joanne McNally raised a different possibility: some players could be treating him as a fall guy or decoy. Those doubts help explain why an apparent confession still led to a round-table debate, instead of settling the question on the spot.

Romesh Ranganathan gave Grant a more direct warning before the earlier episode ended. As the BBC recounted, he told Grant that the disclosure had forced the group's hand. The programme then stopped before voting began, leaving the outcome unresolved. The new report supplies the missing result: Grant was the first contestant banished by a round-table vote in this series.

Did Maya Jama and James Acaster vote for Grant?

Yes. The Press Association report says both Jama and Acaster voted against Grant, alongside the majority of contestants. That is the revealing detail in the result: the votes against him included the two people who knew he really was a Traitor. The report does not give a vote tally, so the precise margin cannot be stated from the available account.

Their roles had already been established in the BBC's earlier recap. Grant and Jama invited Acaster to join them as a Traitor, and the three were involved in the removal of Amol Rajan. Rajan was taken out before he could participate in a banishment vote. Acaster said at the time that he was unhappy about no longer being a faithful but feared being killed if he refused to join them.

That earlier removal and Grant's banishment are separate turns in the game. Rajan's exit came through a Traitor decision; Grant's came through the round-table vote after his admission became a focus of discussion. The distinction matters because the BBC recap described the suspicion and ended before the vote, while the later Press Association report establishes who left and how Jama and Acaster voted.

What is known about the episode's audience?

The BBC gave a peak audience of 8.6 million for the preceding episode and an average of 8.9 million for the series debut. Those figures show the scale of viewing for earlier instalments; they are not an audience figure for Grant's banishment. The available reports also do not establish how Jama or Acaster reacted after the episode, beyond recording their votes against him.