Alleviating our new year fear and seeing us through a quiet January, the BBC show The Traitors has made an incredibly welcome return to our screens in 2025.
So, while we’re getting all tied up in the mystery and madness of our favourite high camp game show, it’s worth talking about the origins of it because if anything, they’re even more chaotic and delicious than the show itself.
It all goes back to 1629...
Jasper Hoogendoorn, who oversaw the programme’s development, explained at the Edinburgh TV festival that the show was originally inspired by The Voyage of the Batavia, a Dutch ship which was shipwrecked off Australia in 1629.
“It was an old Dutch story. In 1629 300 Dutch people went to Indonesia with big treasure on the ship. There were some people who became mutineers and they were shipwrecked on a very small island off the coast of Australia,” he explained.
Once they were shipwrecked, The Batavia’s passengers faced a group of mutineers and soon broke into factions and starting killing one another and eventually, only 129 people remained at the eventual rescue.
Grim.
Hoogendoorn said at the festival: “It’s a story about people who murder each other, backstab each other, betray each other. It’s a horrible story. But it was such a fascinating story and I was thinking it’s also exciting. It’s so exciting to read that story and that’s where the whole idea came to create the show.”
Of course, they didn’t quite take that route. While the show we know and love today is still quite heavily inspired by the events, the cost of filming on a ship was simply too much, according to The Guardian.
Personally, I’m glad that they stuck with the drama of the time but did away with the, uh, heinous violence.
