is the best gig in British broadcasting. Everyone wants to have a go, as is obvious from the second series’ ridiculously good cast, but something that is easily forgotten in the five – yes, five – months of excitement since it was announced is how quickly it can be over, no matter how much of a “big dog” you are.

It is the best gig in British broadcasting, but also the most brutal – where you may not last more than an episode and disappointment, vulnerability and resentment loom. Even the stars can come away feeling short-changed.

And so, we ended the very first episode with a savage cliffhanger: one of the two biggest bookings are getting the chop. In the dead of night, Amol Rajan, the ubiquitous broadcaster who just left the programme, was summoned to the old stone chapel where he stood, shivering in a shearling jacket in honour of his beloved Del Boy, to meet the Traitors face-to-face and plead for his salvation.

Next to him, heart also sinking, was an uneasy James Acaster, one of the most accomplished stand-ups of his generation. Both men wound up lying in coffins awaiting their fate. One will be given a Traitors cloak; the other will have a coffin lid slammed in their face.

I’m gutted it’s already down to those two, who I’d love to see stay in the game for weeks, but they brought it on themselves. Anyone who’s watched should know by now that if you’ve got suspicions this early on, the prudent move is to keep quiet about them. Given that Richard E Grant literally told a room full of people he was a Traitor, I’m not sure you could call Rajan and Acaster’s queries “suspicion”, but both of them came in hard for him, and needed to be dealt with, fast.

You don’t become famous, and certainly not as a journalist or a comedian, by sitting quietly in the shadows, which is why celebrities – usually louder and naturally more attention-seeking than civvies – don’t make brilliant Faithfuls. They might be perceptive, shrewd judges of character and accurate in their theories and accusations, but staying in the game is not about being right, it’s about avoiding getting murdered or banished. They should have held their horses. By being too vocal and pro-active, as Faithfuls both of them have failed.

Who, then, will be the most valuable Traitor? Who has the best chance at throwing the Faithful off the scent before the first Round Table, where Richard will surely get annihilated? Who will be the best team-mate for Maya Jama, if Richard goes? Who will play the most interesting and unpredictable game for the next three weeks?

Amol’s great qualities are his energy and his curiosity. He’s enthusiastic, he takes chances, he’s good fun and he speaks directly and honestly. All of this makes him a brilliant journalist and interviewer and ought to have made him an equally good Faithful, but he forgot that Traitors are not the only ones who need to be discreet, and it cost him.

As a Traitor – which he wanted to be, all along – he would need to remain in the part of bloodthirsty news hound, weaponising their trust, carefully interrogating the wrong people in order to influence everyone else’s opinions and suspicions. I know he’s got all the ritual killing in him, and he’d make the right decisions about who to bin off every night, but murdering is the easy part of . I fear that Amol, who was criticised regularly for being too much of an open book on Radio 4, will buckle under the pressure of lying when so much of his career has been a commitment to the truth.

Presenting the programme is a very different job to that of an undercover reporter, and to avoid slipping up or cracking up from the lies, he’ll need do something much worse: go quiet. He entered the castle full-force as a broadcasting big dog, and nothing will be more suspicious than if he turns the volume down.

James has a major advantage over Amol Rajan: he’s weird. His stand-up can be high-concept and experimental – his most famous show was about his mental breakdown and his girlfriend leaving him for Rowan Atkinson; his current tour has him in the role of a James Acaster impersonator – and on The Off-Menu Podcast he plays the role of the genie waiter, a creature of frenzied, rambling absurdity, screaming “poppadoms or bread?” in the faces of his guests. He isn’t insincere, exactly, but as is the case with a lot of comedians, it’s never quite clear where the act of “chaotic, highly-strung boy from Kettering” ends and the man begins.

It makes him an interesting proposition in . He wanted to be a Faithful – for some, the guessing is much more fun than the killing – but he’s got a nervous, shifty energy about him that risked making people suspicious even before he was called to the chapel, and he’ll need the other four comedians, who know that part of his personality, to defend him.

If they do, he’ll be able to recover from his recklessness at the beginning – he can just assume recklessness as part of his shambolic act. Alan Carr got away with murder after murder by staying in giggly, chaotic character – and James is even more experienced at playing multiple versions of himself. He’s also much less easy to read. If he’s subtle enough in rowing back on his Richard accusations, and has grown in resilience since he went viral for crumbling under the pressure of in 2019, the odd, unpredictable James Acaster could play a very exciting game.

In a castle full of famous people, your greatest weapon is nobody knowing who you really are.

‘The Celebrity Traitors’ continues tonight at 8pm on BBC One