Like a half-built holiday hotel, this tropical Traitors needs more work

YOU check into your hotel room and there’s an unlocked briefcase on the table, with a quarter of a million quid in banknotes stashed inside. What do you do — call the police? Call room service? Or call a taxi to the airport?

‘We are taking that and getting straight out of here,’ decided Lesley, 55, from Suffolk, whose partner Gary was recently made redundant.

Unluckily for them, the aluminium case waiting for them in their suite at a five- star Caribbean resort, at the start of The Fortune Hotel, didn’t contain £250,000. Instead, they found a ticket guaranteeing eviction from the show at the end of the day.

The money was down the corridor, waiting for mum Jo-Anne and her son Will. ‘I knew I could smell it,’ Jo-Anne gasped.

They were among ten pairs playing ITV’s new tropical reality show, a sort of Traitors In The Sunshine. Host Stephen Mangan, best known as Nicola Walker’s unfaithful husband from The Split, explained the rules in a couple of swift sentences before the players even had a chance to arrive: each duo gets a briefcase and mustn’t reveal whether it contains the cash, the check-out card or wads of blank paper.

Winning challenges will give them a chance to swap cases and find the money. It’s as simple as that . . . in fact, a bit too simple.

The format’s flaw is that, especially in the early stages of this nightly, eight-part show, none of the couples wants to do a swap, except for the pair lumbered with the elimination card. Everybody else is content to sit tight.

It’s like a game of poker where no one dares place a bet or draw another card.

Mangan knows this. To stir things up, he instructed Lesley and Gary to do a briefcase swap with Scottish pals Jen and Susan. One’s a government administrator, the other describes herself as a ‘criminal investigator’. Their look of dismay, when they realised they were now on the verge of going home early, was unmistakable — and all the other players saw it. So much for secrets.

We hadn’t even reached the first challenge, and it was already obvious that Mangan has total control of who wins and loses . . . unlike Claudia Winkleman in The Traitors.

A treasure hunt followed, with players following clues and taking selfies around the island. Barrister Dan and his wife Claire solved the riddles with embarrassing ease.

Beauty business partners Louie and Chloe thought they’d got every one right as well. In fact, they came last, partly because they thought crabs were fish. The problem was, they were both thicker than Chloe’s lip-fillers.

But thanks to a telepathic inspiration, Louie decided on a sudden whim to swap their briefcase with Will and Jo-Anne, and found themselves holding the money. It was almost as if someone in the know had dropped him a hint.

The game almost works but, ultimately, like a half-built holiday hotel, it needs more work.