The Traitors Boom Leaves Scotland’s Own Crew Behind

Celebrity Traitors returns at 8pm on Thursday, 1 October, with 21 stars filing into Ardross Castle in the Highlands. The BBC has booked the franchise as a Scottish hit, and Screen Scotland says the wider screen sector is on course to add £1 billion a year to the economy by 2030/31.

Credit lists compiled by documentary film-maker Peter Strachan show how few of the production jobs sit with Scotland-based staff. The same visitor rush that fattens the value column is already spilling into villages of about 150 people.

Ardross Castle Hosts Another Celebrity Traitors Series

The opening episode runs to 9:15pm on BBC One and iPlayer, with ten episodes through a finale on 30 October. Contestants play for up to £100,000 for charity. Claudia Winkleman is back as host. Filming at the private castle on the River Alness, north of Inverness, wrapped in the summer.

VisitScotland already folds the building into its screen-tourism trail, alongside Outlander country, Highland shoots for The Odyssey, and Glasgow streets that have stood in for New York and Gotham. The castle is not open for casual visits. It can be hired for weddings and corporate days when the crew is gone.

Studio Lambert makes the UK and US editions from a Scottish base, and the BBC counts the series toward the 8% of network hours and spend it must place in Scotland. Hayley Valentine, director of BBC Scotland, wrote in the corporation’s own impact study that the show qualifies because it is made from a production base in Scotland and because more than half the spend on the production team goes on people living outside London, “although not majority Scotland-based.”

That is the gap the launch night will not show. Viewers will see Highland stone and Winkleman’s knits. The people who cut, produce and run the series still mostly clock in from somewhere else.

The Show Qualifies as Scottish Without a Scottish Majority

Ofcom’s out-of-London rules exist, in the regulator’s words, to “support and strengthen the television production sector and creative economies of the UK’s nations and regions.” A title can count as a regional production if it meets two of three qualifying tests.

OFCOM’S THREE GATES

• Substantive base: The company must run the show from a real production office outside the M25, with executives and senior staff based there.
• Spend test: At least 70% of the production budget, with some costs stripped out, must be spent outside the M25.
• Talent test: At least 50% of off-screen talent, by cost, must have their usual place of work outside the M25.

Meeting two is enough. A Highland castle plus a Glasgow letterhead can carry a “Scotland” tag even when the senior bench still lives in London. Ofcom later corrected its Made Outside London register after Traitors series one was listed as hitting a 50% Scotland talent mark; the 50% applied to people based outside London.

Strachan founded Standing Up For Scotland’s Screen Talent and has been reading the end credits. Series three, the last civilian run he fully counted in early 2025, listed 13 of 219 people as Scotland-based, about 6%. About 70.8% of those roles sat in London. He has also said three-quarters of Scottish directors, heads of department and crew were out of work when he first published the figures, and that independent companies were “on their knees.”

SCOTLAND-BASED CREDITS ON THE TRAITORS

On the celebrity edition, 13 of those 27 Scottish hires were entry-level or junior, including runners and researchers. More than 76% of that 197-strong team, and 83% of the senior roles, were London-based. The rise from series three looks better on a spreadsheet than on a call sheet.

Strachan put the licence-fee point bluntly when the civilian figures first landed.

Is it acceptable that the BBC should be using money that’s earmarked to promote growth and jobs in Scotland and spending it on a series that is basically not doing that, a Scottish commission on which hardly anyone based in Scotland is working?

Peter Strachan, documentary film-maker and campaigner

Studio Lambert chief executive Stephen Lambert said the Scottish television community is “large and talented,” and that the firm has used Scottish staff on drama. Reality on this scale, he said, needs a different skill set. “We are employing and training talented people based in Scotland to work on The Traitors.” He also said the show is acclaimed because it employs “the most experienced reality show production talent in the UK,” and that the Scottish share should rise.

In January 2026 Valentine told MPs that more than 70 Scotland-based crew had worked on the most recent series, still under half the team, and that it was “not meeting the 50% criteria for the staff working on it.” She did not give a full headcount. Alan Cumming, who hosts the US edition at the same castle, has been pushing for more Scottish production roles. Culture Secretary Angus Robertson sought talks with the BBC and Ofcom after the first credit row.

Hotels and Hire Cars Fill the £21.8m Column

The BBC’s £21.8 million GVA impact report, covering 2022 to 2025 and taking in the UK, US and celebrity editions, is the number ministers and tourism officials now reach for. For every £1 of direct gross value added, the study says £6.84 landed in the wider Scottish economy. It counts more than 750 jobs supported, about 189 a year, and 14.8 further jobs for every Scotland-based production post, through hotels, car hire, catering and local suppliers.

THE TRAITORS ECONOMY, 2022 TO 2025

• £21.8 million: Gross value added the BBC attributes to the franchise in Scotland.
• £6.84: Wider economic value claimed for every £1 of direct GVA.
• 750 jobs: Posts the model says were supported, about 189 a year.
• 14.8 extra jobs: Wider roles claimed for each Scotland-based production job.

Strachan does not dispute the hotel and hire-car spend. He disputes calling that a production-career story. Most of the 750 supported posts are not camera, edit or directing jobs. Ardross Castle itself saw a fourfold rise in event enquiries. Expedia recorded a 190% jump in searches for the Highlands after series two. Tour operator Evan Evans reported a 44% rise in Edinburgh-related searches and a 27% rise in Scotland-wide searches in the first three weeks of January 2025, after series three.

Screen Scotland’s wider ledger, compiled with Saffery LLP and Nordicity, puts sector GVA at £718 million in 2023, up 15% from £627 million in 2021. Employment rose 12.1%, from 10,940 full-time equivalent posts to 12,260. Visitor spend on screen tourism in that study was £161.4 million. Those are real pounds. They are also a different pile of money from a director’s year of work.

Valentine has argued that dwelling on the crew split risks putting other productions off filming in Scotland. That warning does the same job as the GVA model. It asks the country to treat visitor spend as the proof that a public-service commission has done its duty, even when the 50% talent test is still missed.

Glenfinnan’s 150 Residents Meet 600,000 Visitors

The Traitors castle is a closed set. The older screen sites are not. Glenfinnan, in Lochaber, is home to about 150 people and to the viaduct that doubled as the Hogwarts Express crossing in the Harry Potter films. The National Trust for Scotland puts visitors at more than 600,000 a year.

Police Scotland spent August stopping cars on the A830, the Fort William to Mallaig road that runs through the hamlet. Officers from local and roads policing issued 11 fixed penalty notices in a short stretch for parking partly on the pavement and on the road. The force said people who live and work there were being affected by antisocial behaviour and dangerous parking, and asked visitors to come by train or bus.

GLENFINNAN’S 2026 CROWD CALENDAR

1. 30 June 2026: Network Rail Scotland issues a stay off the tracks warning as the Jacobite steam season runs, after fans climb fences and walk the line for a shot of the train.
2. 11 August 2026: Police Scotland tickets 11 motorists on the A830 for dangerously obstructing the road through the hamlet.

Neil Cook, route crime manager for Network Rail Scotland, said the crossing is “a magical sight but it’s not worth risking your life for.” Trains come from either direction, he said, and cannot stop quickly. Dedicated viewpoints exist on the Glenfinnan Viaduct Trail. Trespassing on the railway is a criminal offence.

This is the second bill the boom does not print. The first is a career structure for people who already work in Scottish film and TV. The second is a Highland road that was never built for a global set-jetting queue.

Outlander Filled Culloden Faster Than the Site Could Hold

Culloden battlefield, a fixture of Outlander, was closed for a spell in 2023 after wear from the crowd. Data from Glasgow Caledonian University’s Moffat Centre and the Association of Scottish Visitor Attractions then recorded a 42.8% rise in 2024, to 374,443 visits at the visitor centre, the largest jump among the sites they ranked.

Gillian Shields, 54, lives in Inverness, near the Clan Fraser stone that now draws Outlander fans. “People here are welcoming, and most of the visitors are lovely and respectful,” she said. “We’re not trying to turn anyone away, it’s just we see more and more every single year and it’s a worry whether our beautiful area can keep up with it.”

VisitScotland’s own Outlander work found that one in five visitors is inspired by film, TV and books featuring Scotland, rising to 36% of European visitors and 37% of long-haul visitors. Blackness Castle, used in the first season, saw a 367% rise in visits between 2014 and 2024. Jenni Steele, the agency’s film and creative industries manager, said the benefits of film tourism “are worth millions to the economy, bringing jobs and opportunities, and are felt long after the film or TV series is released.” She also said success “can bring with it challenges in certain locations,” and that the agency works with local bodies to steer fans beyond the on-screen pin.

Fans will come anyway. Steele is right about that. The open question is whether a trail that sells Ardross, Culloden and Glenfinnan as one product can keep the smallest pins from breaking.

Who Gets Hired When Hollywood Comes to Glasgow?

Glasgow has had the opposite problem: too much set, not always the same careers. Streets have been dressed as 1960s New York for Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, as Gotham for Batgirl, as dystopian America for The Running Man, and as Soviet Moscow for Tetris. Marvel’s Spider-Man: Brand New Day shot in the city in 2025. Strachan asked Sony Pictures to publish a breakdown of who was hired.

“Local hiring is not necessarily the same thing as employing Scotland’s established screen-sector workforce,” he said. A Glasgow carpenter brought in for a few weeks of set build can be counted as local without ever being part of the film and television workforce. That is how an inward shoot can light up a neighbourhood and still leave the city’s directors and heads of department waiting on a call that does not come.

Matthew, 42, lives in the city centre and likes the circus. Neighbours have picked up extra work. Restaurants have fed crews. “Some people moan about road closures and parking, but it’s great to see the city buzzing with excitement when a new show comes to town,” he said. “The city needs those jobs and that money, and, to be frank, a bit of fun and glamour never hurt a Glaswegian either.”

Both things can sit on the same street. A block can be closed for Gotham and still not train a Scottish first assistant director. Screen Scotland last year doubled a talent programme to £1.2 million and still runs a £4 million film fund and a £2.5 million broadcast content fund. Those pots are small next to a Marvel occupancy or a BBC entertainment machine.

Scottish Companies Are Losing the Public Commissions

David Smith is interim executive director of Screen Scotland. He says the country has gained from the growing sector, and also that there has been a “consistent decline” in the number of shows commissioned by public service broadcasters from Scottish production companies. “We think this needs to change,” he said. “Ultimately, we want to see a sustainable mix of film and TV projects made across genres, broadcasts and platforms.”

The 2023 figures explain the unease. Public service spend in Scotland was £222.4 million, almost the same as £223.3 million in 2021, a real-terms drop once costs rose. Independent film spend rose 10% to £8.4 million from £7.6 million, still tiny. Inward film and high-end TV fell to £173.5 million in 2023 from £347 million in 2021 after the US writers’ and actors’ strikes, though it stayed above the 2019 mark of £165 million. Seventeen films and series started shooting in the first half of 2024, with about £194 million of production spend, putting the year on course for up to £400 million of combined inward and independent work.

Research for Screen Scotland found that only five of the top 15 producers of programmes classed as Scottish between 2014 and 2022 were headquartered in Scotland. The rest qualified through a “substantive base.” Isabel Davis, the agency’s executive director, has pointed to a worldwide drop in unscripted commissions even as tourism and cinema recovered. High-end television can look healthy while documentary and unscripted work, the jobs many Scottish companies actually do, falls away.

Four more Traitors series were already confirmed for 2026 when the BBC published its impact study, including a new US civilian version. Series two of the celebrity run now fills Thursday and Friday nights until 30 October. The castle will hold. The credit list, and the A830, are the parts of the boom that still have to.