Kate Garraway says Celebrity Traitors felt ‘transforming’ after husband’s death

Good Morning Britain presenter Kate Garraway has said appearing on The Celebrity Traitors felt “transforming”, as she was given permission “to just play” after years of caring for her late husband.

Garraway’s husband, former lobbyist and political adviser Derek Draper, died at the age of 56 in January 2024 after suffering long-lasting symptoms from coronavirus.

In the BBC One Traitors’ spin-off stars including Garraway, 58, have attempted to win a charity prize pot by completing missions and trying to banish a small group of secretive traitors, who “murder” contestants in the middle of the night in a ploy to take the money for themselves.

Garraway, who was banished after being accused of being a traitor on Thursday, told BBC Radio 2: “The whole experience has been transforming, actually.”

“It’s been lovely to meet people from different worlds.

“I mean, after sort of five nearly six, years of caring for someone you love, your world goes very in, and you’re literally, every minute of the day, thinking ‘What about the medication? What am I going to do? What happens next? Where do we need to go?’

“And so it’s been looking in and then after he passed away, very much looking in on the children, worried for them.

“So to suddenly sort of be able to look out and just jump into other people’s lives, which I felt like I was doing with… I mean, people that you’ve respected for years, was amazing. And to just play.

“And I think maybe the one advantage I had was that, even though it was so intense and I felt so pressured and I was so useless most of the time, is that when you sort of live genuinely with life or death for a long time, as we did, particularly for the first two years, it was daily.

“Then you have got the ability to sort of enjoy something that is just a game. And so I think I almost took too much pleasure in it, because it was just such a sort of a bursting of a valve, really of tension. And it was lovely.”

She added: “I’m very conscious that I’m very lucky to have had that, because there are people caring right now, millions of them that are going through their day with that absolute sort of closed down, loving, claustrophobia, and so I just feel incredibly grateful to have been part of it all, because it’s been wonderful.”

During her time on the show Garraway became the subject of a viral clip in which retired Olympic diver Tom Daley give her the side eye when she said “that is flabbergasting”, after it was revealed that singer Paloma Faith had been “murdered” in plain sight.

Daley, who suspected Garraway of being a traitor because of her use of the word, uploaded a social media video after he was murdered by the traitors and said: “I guess my flabbers were officially gasted.”

Garraway told BBC Radio 2: “The problem is that I do say that, because he said, ‘No-one says flabbergasted. It’s like saying whoops-a-daisy’, which I just want to tell you, I also do.

“I think it’s a generational thing, although I’m very proud now that I was on a holiday with the kids, we’re in a swimming pool this week in the UK, and there were a whole bunch of eight to 12-year-olds going ‘I’m flabbergasted Kate. I’m flabbergasted’. So I now have created a flabbergasted generation.”

The final of The Celebrity Traitors airs on Thursday November 6 at 9pm on BBC One.