Life’s a beach as couples check in for Traitors with sun, sea and sand
The daily challenge was a tedious five minutes of shouting and running about
In the showbiz world, there’s something called the ‘elevator pitch’ – imagine you’re stuck in a lift with an executive and you have to sell your idea to them in the time it takes the lift to move between floors.
Watching The Fortune Hotel (ITV, Mon-Thurs, 9pm) it was pretty easy to see how the producers might have sold this particular idea to the network – ’think The Traitors ona Caribbean island’.
ITV’s new show shares many elements with the BBC’s Scotland-set hit reality game show.
Everyone’s stuck in the same picturesque location; there are daily challenges which confer an advantage on whoever wins them; there is a nightly confrontation which ends in an elimination.
And that’s not all. Just as in The Traitors, there are different factions within the wider group.
But whereas the Claudia Winkleman’s Highland game had ’the faithful’ trying to identify ’the traitors’, The Fortune Hotel muddies the crystal-clear Caribbean waters with a third group.
There are ’the fortune hunters’, ’the fortune holders’ and – bear with me on this – ’the other ones who have the early check-out notice in their suitcase’.
Oh yes, the suitcases. There are 10 couples competing, and each gets a lovely suitcase – one of those metallic, hard-shell ones which look so good on a baggage carousel.
Only the couples know whether their suitcase contains the £250,000 cash prize, nothing at all, or the early check-out ticket.
During the course of the day, there chances for the couples to swap their suitcase, and at the end of the day, anyone can swap with the winners of the daily challenge get the final choice of whether to swap or not.
The object of the game is – initially at least – to make sure you’re not the ones holding the check-out suitcase at the end of the day, otherwise you’re going home.
If all of this sounds quite complicated, that’s because it is, but at least it makes more sense than the way host Stephen Mangan initially made it sound.
“Winning the day trip challenge will give you an advantage going into the nightcap at the Lady Luck bar,” he told them, as if that would somehow clear everything up.
But where The Traitors genuinely had the potential for conflict, with the faithfuls having to work together to banish the traitors or risk losing the cash, any needle in the nightcap seemed totally confected, given anyone with an empty cash would simply choose to hang on to it.
And it was the teamwork element of The Traitors which ITV’s new offering seems to ignore. As a viewer, you could pull for one team or the other, and co-operation could produce results.
In The Fortune Hotel, however, it’s each couple for themselves and by putting them at loggerheads from the outset means the couples show the worst sides of themselves in the name of entertainment.
The daily challenge – in the first episode at least – was a tedious five minutes of shouting and running about, revealing little about the contestants beyond the fact they weren’t very good at solving treasure hunt clues.
Meanwhile, much of the rest of the show is taken up with slow-motion walking – from hotel rooms to the bar, the bar to hotel rooms, down corridors and alongside swimming pools.
Each slow-motion walk accompanied by a sloweddown, mumbled version of a famous pop hit.
And the final echo of The Traitors came at the end, when the couple holding the cash got to choose who would start the next day in possession of the early check-out case.
Cue them naming a couple of candidates, shots of those candidates – in slow-motion, obviously – and then a late night message delivery.
TV does tend to eat itself, and following the enormous success of The Traitors, there was always going to be a slew of attempts to replicate the format. The problem for The Fortune Hotel – as that executive in the lift would tell you – is that coming second makes you first loser.
The Fortune Hotel, ITV,
Mon-Thurs, 9pm.