Romesh Ranganathan says he feels ‘a little bit of embarrassment’ at Traitors win

Comedian Romesh Ranganathan has said he feels “a little bit of embarrassment” after winning the 2026 series of The Celebrity Traitors alongside actor Sebastian Croft.

The 48-year-old took home £41,500 for his chosen charity, the Refugee Council, after he and Heartstopper star Croft were the last two players remaining as faithfuls at the firepit on the BBC reality gameshow.

Speaking after his win, Ranganathan said: “It’s happiness tinged with a little bit of embarrassment.

“I feel that I’ve won the game, despite I would say my key development area in this game being identifying Traitors correctly. I think that’s probably the thing that I was the worst at.”

The final saw him wrongly accuse singer James Blunt of being a traitor at the firepit, causing the You’re Beautiful singer to vote to banish again, which led to Ranganathan and Croft voting him out.

Ranganathan said that despite feeling that his “level of contribution to the game” was less than others who had departed the show earlier, he was “really happy to have won”.

He added: “James Blunt at some point in the future will kill me, and I’m saying that now. It’s almost certain. I don’t think his family are going to like me when they watch the show.

“I set up a hate campaign against Michael Sheen on camera. I genuinely said tonight we kill the king, which doesn’t sound faithful.”

The second banishment saw two votes each for Blunt and traitor King Kenny, splitting the vote, leaving Ranganathan and Croft to vote again to try to break the deadlock, eventually deciding to banish Kenny as Ranganathan eventually agreed with Croft.

Ranganathan added: “When I thought about the visual for the final two, I’d always thought me and Bash. I was almost 100% certain that he was a faithful.

“So then I’m thinking, well, the very minimal victory is it’s me and Bash, right? But then you don’t want to just get rid of everyone because, selfishly, you think you’re only certain about one person.

“So I’m thinking to myself, ‘well, in that case, there’s a third person’. So Bash and myself, I’m certain about, and then it’s another, either James or Kenny.

“And it was so marginal, me flitting between them both, and I locked onto being suspicious of James because he was following theories about faithfuls and then not being at all reticent about going for another one. I just thought that was a bit suspicious.”