BBC accused of poaching Traitors concept by Agatha Christie’s great-grandson

James Prichard, chairman of the late author’s estate, believes popular BBC reality show was heavily inspired by Christie’s 1939 story ‘And Then There Were None’. The concept behind the BBC deception gameshow The Traitors was taken from Agatha Christie’s murder mysteries, the author’s great-grandson has claimed.

TV and film producer James Prichard, the chairman of Agatha Christie Limited – the company managing the literary and media rights to her work – believes that the “brilliant” reality show is inspired by Chirstie’s famous 1939 mystery novel And Then There Were None.

"At the beginning of the series, they're on the train. They’ve got the board with all the faces being picked off, one by one. They’ve got the library, it’s everything Agatha Christie. It’s And Then There Were None in lots of ways.". The award-winning series, hosted by Claudia Winkleman, sees a group of 22 contestants arrive at a 19th-century Scottish Baronial-style castle where they are secretly split into two camps. A small number are the “traitors”, who must work together to “murder” their fellow contestants, called “faithfuls”, while their identities remain undetected. The aim of the game is to successfully identify other contestants’ status in the game and root them out – or hide in plain sight – to make it through to the final, where a £120,000 prize pot is available.

Christie’s 1939 novel has parallels to the show, since it follows 10 strangers who are invited by a mysterious host to an isolated island with an unknown killer living among them. They are killed one by one, while those who remain must work out the identity of the murderer.

The Traitors also includes tropes prominent in Christie’s stories, such as a grand library and a luxury train carrying a group of passengers. Prichard said: “There's a recognition amongst a lot of the crime-writing fraternity that my great-grandmother is an inspiration. It’s great. I love that murder mystery is growing in popularity.”.

However, the show is based on the Dutch reality show format, originally known as De Verraders in its native language. De Verraders, which first aired in 2021, was inspired by the story of a real-life mutiny onboard a 17th-century Dutch ship, the Batavia, that was wrecked off the coast of Australia in 1629. The surviving passengers the split into faction, killing each other after anarchy broke out among them when they were shipwrecked on land that had no food or drinking water.

The Dutch show was originally planned to be filmed on a large ship, before producers settled on a castle. Jasper Hoogendoorn, the programme’s developer, said at the Edinburgh TV festival in 2023: “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.”.

The Traitors has since become a global hit, with three series of the British version presented by Winkleman (launched in 2022), an Australian edition presented by Rodger Corser (2023), and a celebrity Traitors US version hosted by Alan Cumming (2023).

The show’s format also has parallels with the party game known as Werewolf or Mafia, a social deduction game wherein players are secretly assigned roles as werewolves or villagers. The werewolves can kill other players, while during the day, players debate and vote to eliminate a suspect.