Professor Hannah Fry on The Celebrity Traitors: “I am toxically competitive”

Professor Hannah Fry has made it clear that she will be playing to win on the new series of The Celebrity Traitors.

The TV presenter and distinguished mathematician is part of the cohort of famous faces taking part in the second celeb edition of the treacherous game, which was filmed in Scotland earlier this year.

“I would say I am toxically competitive,” Fry said before the show began. “Yes, to a fault. I have to try and rein that in. This really is a team game. Especially for the Faithfuls. The only real way the Faithfuls are going to win it is if they act as a team.

“And I probably would rather be a Faithful. I think it would be really fun to be a Traitor, like amazingly fun but I want to enjoy this experience as much as I possibly can for however long it lasts, and I think that I’ll enjoy it more if I get to be a truer, more honest version of myself.”

The 42-year-old, who holds a BA, MA, PhD and numerous awards and works at the University of Cambridge, also revealed that she intends to use her maths background in the competition – including taking inspiration from the legendary scientist Alan Turing.

“I’m here to fulfil the nerd quota for the year, and I’m taking my responsibility extremely seriously,” she joked. “Have I gone back through the data of all the previous games and tried to find statistically significant patterns? Yes! Are any of these going to help me? Honestly, who knows?!

“There is a pattern in the way that Traitors behave. For example, Traitors often do a burn vote in the first few episodes when they’re settling in. By that I mean they just vote for somebody that nobody else has voted for. Cat [Burns] last year was a really good example of this, but across the board, the only problem with picking up on those signals is that the Faithfuls are such an absolute mess. They are so all over the place that it’s really hard to pick out what the signal is. That’s just one example of a little bit of maths that I’ve got in my back pocket.”

She continued: “I am using the same bit of math that Alan Turing used to crack the Enigma machine. Whether it’s going to work or not, honestly, your guess is as good as mine! I’ve got spreadsheets coming out of my eyeballs. I close my eyes and it’s like there are numbers tattooed on the inside of my eyelids at the moment for how much I’ve been looking at them.”

The Celebrity Traitors begins at 8pm on Thursday, October 1 on BBC One and iPlayer.