Celebrity Traitors Proves We Still Crave Shared Experiences

Cast members gathered around a fire in Celebrity Traitors

In an age of streaming, personalised feeds and on-demand everything, one of Britain’s biggest television moments has reminded us that people still want to experience things together.

For an industry that has spent the best part of two decades telling us that television is becoming more personalised, more fragmented and more on-demand, something rather inconvenient happened in Britain last week. More than 11 million people decided to watch the same television programme at roughly the same time, and many of them spent the following day talking about it with colleagues, friends and family.

The 2026 finale of Celebrity Traitors attracted an average overnight audience of 11.2 million viewers, peaked at 11.6 million and took a remarkable 62.9% share of everyone watching television at the time. The series had already opened strongly, with 8.9 million viewers watching the first episode, up considerably from the 6.1 million who watched the debut of the first celebrity series, according to The Independent.

Those are impressive television numbers, but they are not the most interesting part of the story. The more revealing development happened outside the living room, where people actively chose to turn a television programme into a social event and, in doing so, exposed something much bigger about what people still want from media.

The television event escaped the television

Across London, pubs, bars and entertainment venues began organising Celebrity Traitors viewing parties. Time Out identified at least eight different finale screenings across the capital, ranging from Boxpark Croydon to Big Penny Social in Walthamstow, with some venues adding quizzes, costumes, themed cocktails, prizes and games. Free tickets for the Boxpark event sold out.

The Guardian described crowds cheering, booing and shouting at the screen with the kind of collective energy normally associated with football. At one Clapham venue, fans had been meeting to watch every episode together, complete with themed drinks and mock banishment ceremonies.

There is something fascinating about that behaviour. We have spent billions building technology that allows us to watch whatever we want, whenever we want and wherever we want, yet when something sufficiently compelling comes along, people willingly give up some of that convenience because experiencing it with other people makes it better. The future of media, it seems, may not be quite as solitary as we thought.

Television has never been more personal

The direction of travel has seemed obvious for years. Scheduled television has been replaced by streaming, broad channels have been supplemented by personalised recommendations, and platforms such as YouTube, TikTok and Netflix increasingly construct entertainment around the individual rather than the household.

Ofcom’s latest Media Nations research illustrates just how dramatically the landscape has changed. Only 70% of people now watch content from traditional broadcasters during an average week, down from 78% in 2022, while Netflix is now the first place 26% of viewers say they go when deciding what to watch, fractionally ahead of the BBC at 25%.

Even the television set itself is changing. YouTube viewing on TV sets has doubled since 2022, with average daily viewing rising from nine minutes per person in 2022 to 19 minutes in 2025, while broadcaster on-demand viewing also increased by 9% year on year. The television screen is therefore still very much alive, but the assumption that everybody sitting in front of one should be watching the same thing has weakened considerably.

Media has become extraordinarily good at giving each of us exactly what we want, at exactly the moment we want it. Celebrity Traitors has succeeded by doing almost the opposite, because it has given millions of people something they want to experience, discuss and speculate about together.

The conversation might be more important than the programme

Part of the genius of The Traitors format is that watching the episode is only half of the entertainment. The other half begins afterwards, when somebody asks who you think the Traitor is, why someone voted the way they did, or how a contestant has apparently failed to notice what everyone watching at home believes is obvious.

Suddenly everybody becomes a psychologist. A raised eyebrow becomes evidence, a badly timed defence becomes suspicious, and someone who has correctly identified a Traitor for three consecutive episodes becomes inexplicably trustworthy. The programme creates conversation by design, and what is particularly interesting is the breadth of that conversation.

Celebrity Traitors does not appear to belong neatly to one age group or one type of viewer. Younger audiences, parents, middle-aged professionals and older viewers can all participate in what has become a remarkably broad cultural conversation, and that is increasingly unusual in a media environment where everyone has their own feed, recommendations and viewing schedule.

A programme watched by millions simultaneously creates something algorithms struggle to manufacture: a reason for different groups of people to have the same conversation. The watch parties take that idea one stage further because the conversation is no longer simply about the shared experience. The conversation itself becomes part of the experience.

This is bigger than Celebrity Traitors

There is evidence that this desire for collective experiences extends far beyond television. Mastercard’s 2026 Experience Economy research found that 65% of UK consumers are actively prioritising in-person experiences to balance the amount of time they spend online, while 71% said experiences are now more important to them than ever.

The same research found that 88% would be prepared to reduce spending on physical goods if it allowed them to participate in more experiences. Mastercard Economics Institute data also found that experiences, excluding travel, accounted for 23.3% of UK consumer spending last year, compared with 22.7% for discretionary retail. By that measure, experiences have overtaken things, suggesting that consumers are not merely talking about valuing experiences more highly but are increasingly allocating their money accordingly.

This is not simply a youth trend either. Among people aged over 65, 84% told Mastercard that experiences create the best memories, while 73% of 35 to 44-year-olds planned to try a new experience during 2026. That makes what is happening around Celebrity Traitors considerably more interesting because people are not necessarily rejecting digital entertainment. They appear to be looking for ways to make digital entertainment feel more social, more memorable and ultimately more human.

Convenience does not automatically win

One of the most persistent assumptions about technology is that convenience eventually defeats everything else. Online shopping is easier than travelling to a shopping centre, streaming is easier than going to the cinema, food delivery is easier than visiting a restaurant, and watching Celebrity Traitors on BBC iPlayer from your sofa is unquestionably easier than travelling across London to watch it in a crowded bar.

Yet cinemas still exist, restaurants remain busy, concert tickets sell out and football stadiums fill every weekend. Apparently, people will also travel across London to watch Claudia Winkleman send celebrities into a Scottish castle, provided the experience surrounding it is compelling enough. Convenience solves a practical problem, but it does not necessarily create an experience, and those two things are not interchangeable.

A goal watched alone is the same goal as one watched inside a packed stadium, yet almost nobody would describe the two experiences as equivalent. A joke becomes funnier when a room laughs, suspense becomes more intense when everyone around you is waiting for the same answer, and excitement itself can become contagious when it is shared. Human beings respond to other human beings, and technology has not changed that fundamental behaviour.

Retail should pay attention

This is particularly important for physical retail. For years, the conversation around shopping centres and high streets has frequently been framed as a battle against ecommerce, but that is a difficult contest if the objective is simply to make purchasing something more convenient.

Amazon is open all night, remembers what you bought, recommends what you might want next and can deliver without requiring you to leave your sofa. A shopping centre cannot beat the internet by attempting to become a slightly less convenient version of the internet. Physical retail has a different advantage because it can give people somewhere to go and something to experience.

If the purpose of a shopping centre is simply to distribute products, ecommerce looks like an existential threat. If its purpose is to bring people together around shopping, food, entertainment, launches, performances and experiences, the competitive equation changes considerably. The Mastercard research supports that argument, with 68% of respondents saying they spend more freely when they are out enjoying an experience.

For retailers and shopping centre operators, that is an enormous opportunity. The challenge is not simply to get people through the door, but to give them enough reasons to stay once they arrive and, ideally, something worth talking about afterwards.

Advertising has the same opportunity

There is a parallel here for advertising. Most digital advertising is fundamentally solitary, with one person scrolling through a social feed, encountering an advert and either engaging with it or moving past it. Physical media operates differently because it exists in public and can become part of the environment around it.

According to Route’s audience data, Out of Home advertising reaches almost 97% of the British population every week, equivalent to around 53.9 million people, while shopping centre advertising alone generates around 2 billion measured impacts each week. The scale is impressive, but the more interesting opportunity appears when that audience stops being passive.

Research into social behaviour outside the home found that people are almost twice as likely to share content while out of home as they are at home, 31% compared with 17%, and twice as likely to capture photos or videos, 18% compared with 9%. That matters because the most powerful physical media experiences do not necessarily end with the person standing directly in front of them.

Someone notices something unusual and stops, another person wonders what they are looking at, somebody takes out a phone, and eventually a small audience begins to form around the original audience. That behaviour is fundamentally different from simply serving another impression. It is closer to the dynamic we see at a Celebrity Traitors watch party, where the presence and reaction of other people becomes part of the attraction.

The physical world has an advantage we underestimated

For years, the technology industry has concentrated on recreating the physical world digitally. Shopping became ecommerce, meetings became video calls, music became streaming, television became on-demand and social interaction became social media. Much of that transformation has been enormously valuable, but perhaps the next phase works partly in the opposite direction.

Some of the most interesting opportunities may now involve taking everything digital technology has made possible and bringing it back into shared physical environments. That does not mean digital failed. It means something was inevitably lost as convenience, personalisation and individual choice became the dominant measures of progress, and shared experience may be one of the things people are beginning to value more precisely because it has become less common.

Celebrity Traitors did not become successful despite the streaming era. In some ways, its success is more interesting because of it, because in a world where everyone can watch different things at different times on different devices, millions of people discovered that there is still something exciting about knowing everybody else is watching too.

Some of them even left home simply to experience that feeling more intensely. That should matter to television executives, retailers, shopping centre owners, entertainment companies, advertisers and anyone designing the next generation of physical spaces. Technology has given us almost unlimited access to content, but what people increasingly appear to crave is something technology alone cannot provide: a reason to experience it together.