Celebrity Traitors Airs Its Penultimate Episode Tonight, with the Final on Friday

The Celebrity Traitors reaches its penultimate episode tonight. BBC One and iPlayer have it at 8pm, with Claudia Winkleman in the host's chair at Ardross Castle. Friday's final, also at 8pm, closes the series. The winners can direct up to 100,000 pounds to a charity of their choice, which is why the round table has started to feel less like a parlour game and more like a collection tin with cloaks.

Thursday morning's cast guides, led by the Independent, show a field that has already been cut hard. Ross Kemp is out, murdered in the show's own language. Julie Hesmondhalgh has been banished. Miranda Hart is the latest faithful the traitors have removed, a departure Thursday's coverage treated as the jolt of the week. Michael Sheen was still listed among the faithful going into tonight. The billing promises one more banishment and a last mission before Friday, when the remaining players have to decide whether the deception has held.

Why tonight is the episode that matters

Series two has run to ten episodes, two a week, on Thursdays and Fridays rather than the old Wednesday slot. Episode seven was on 22 October. Episode eight was on Friday. That leaves tonight as the last chance to change the numbers before the final. A faithful banished now cannot vote on Friday. A traitor who survives tonight has one more breakfast in which to look plausible.

The companion film, Traitor or Faithful? Claudia Decides, has been on iPlayer through the run, showing more of the conversations in which Winkleman chose who would deceive and who would hunt. It does not tell you who is left. It does explain why the round table has been quite so pleased with its own suspicion. The main show remains the one with the money attached.

The names still being argued over

Sheen, the Welsh actor who has spent the year between a new House of Games chair and a run of political drama, has become one of the faithful the audience thinks it can read. That is usually when the show is least reliable. Hart's removal, reported as a murder rather than a banishment, takes out a player whose tell, on the evidence of the weeks so far, was to narrate her own panic. Kemp, still best known as Grant Mitchell, had been playing the faithful the room was slightly afraid of. Hesmondhalgh, an Olivier winner last year and a Coronation Street name from an earlier generation, went by vote.

Maya Jama, who led the red carpet at the British Museum Ball earlier this month, is part of this year's cast. So are names from comedy, music and news who have treated the castle as the October booking that crowds out everything else. We are not going to pretend, the morning before the episode, that the traitors' list is a settled public fact. The people who know are in the turret. The rest of us get the edit at 8pm.

If you want a second screen on Saturday

Strictly Come Dancing's Halloween special is on BBC One from 6.30pm on Saturday, with Shirley Ballas, Craig Revel Horwood, Motsi Mabuse and Anton Du Beke, and the three-handed presenting line of Emma Willis, Johannes Radebe and Josh Widdicombe. The ballroom line-up, and who has already left, is in our guide to the series and in the exit pieces on Shaun Wright-Phillips and Dame Sarah Storey.

Tonight, though, belongs to the castle. Set the reminder for 8pm. If you are catching up, do it before the kettle boils at the round table, because Friday will not wait for anyone who still thinks Ross Kemp is in the game.