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Joanne McNally has remained tight-lipped about her time on The Celebrity Traitors, but that’s not what she intended – the comedian recorded a tell-all podcast episode that will never be aired.
The Irish comic, 43, has revealed that she spilled a load of behind-the-scenes secrets from the show for an episode of her podcast, My Therapist Ghosted Me, but was stopped by the BBC before releasing it.
McNally competed on the last series of The Celebrity Traitors as a Faithful, making it to the penultimate episode before being banished.
Ahead of the show’s finale, she had teased that a bonus episode about her time on the BBC show would be out after the final. However, fans were left disappointed when nothing was released.
In an episode released on Wednesday (4 November), McNally’s podcast producer Joe Attewell explained that a “tell-all” episode was scheduled to be released on Sunday, but had to be pulled at the last minute after the BBC reminded McNally that she would be violating the terms of her contract by sharing the information.
“I think it is now, eight to nine thousand messages we’ve had, and rightly so, asking where that promised bonus extra episode went that was going to come out on Sunday,” he said. “We recorded that on Friday afternoon. It was a tell-all, behind the scenes and all about Joanne’s experience on Celebrity Traitors.”
McNally’s co-host Vogue Williams added: “I had spent ages on the research and the questions and I was finally getting to interview McNally and I was very dusty, hungover, but I was still there smiling.”
Attewell added that he edited the episode as “fast as I could” and that it was ready to be released on Sunday, before joking: “Then late on Friday evening, I was bundled roughly into the back of a BBC van.
“They told me in no uncertain terms that just about everything that had been spoken about on the podcast was a violation of contracts that had been signed.”
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“We’d be taken to the gallows,” McNally said. “Sometimes you’ve got to protect the privacy of the game and I understand that now.”
While they couldn’t publish the episode, Williams revealed that the contents had been “juicy”. The Independent understands that there was no official threat of legal action and that McNally was making a tongue-in-cheek reference.
It is well known that those competing on The Celebrity Traitors and The Traitors have to sign a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) before taking part, which bans them from spoiling anything about the show. Last year, The Traitors series two finalist Jaz Singh said that the show will “sue you for hundreds of thousands of pounds of TV damages” if spoilers are leaked ahead of the show airing.
Other Celebrity Traitors stars haven’t been as discreet since the show ended though; James Blunt revealed this week that viewers “didn’t see the full extent” of James Acaster confessing to being a Traitor at a roundtable in the penultimate episode. He added that Acaster “really didn’t” just put his hands up and quit the show, saying: “It was more dramatic than you saw.”
The BBC show came to an end in October, with Faithful contestants Romesh Ranganathan and Sebastian Croft splitting the £83,000 winnings.