The Traitors contestant doing stand-up in Teviot's turret: 'Winning show let me take up comedy full time'

Now Hannah Byczkowski is to perform her debut comedy hour at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe - in a room aptly called the Turret.

Ms Byczkowski, who won the show in 2022 with two other contestants - Scot Meryl Williams and Aaron Evans - said the series had allowed her to pursue comedy full time. She had quit her job as a home care assistant, assessing palliative care needs for terminally ill patients, just as she appeared on The Traitors, hoping to carve out a career as a full-time comedian.

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“I was going into people’s homes and checking what kind of care they needed for palliative care, but also doing comedy gigs at night and it just didn’t work well,” she said. “Then Traitors happened, which was perfect timing. It gave me the freedom to put all of my time and effort into comedy.”

However, she admits that on the show, she was “not very funny”.

“People tell me, ‘you weren’t very funny’. That’s because I was crying, all day every day. It was emotional from the get go. It was an amazing experience and I’d go back tomorrow, but I don’t think it did wonders to show my humorous side.”

Her show, Killer, does not reference her Traitors fame, although it does focus on her “desensitisation to death” in her previous job. She has previously performed a short run of a work in progress show in Edinburgh and also showcased her popular ghost story podcast, Ghost Huns at the Fringe, which she co-hosts with Suzie Preece.

Appearing on the first series meant she had “no agenda of going into it thinking we would be famous”.

“I just thought no-one would be watching it,” she said. “It was easier then to have that divide between The Traitors and comedy.”

“I did a few shows about my Traitors experience, to see what the desire was for it, but I didn’t really want to be known only for that,” she said. “It was great and it really helped, but it didn’t help directly in comedy, because comedy doesn’t care about reality TV.”

She admits she had hoped to “leave it behind”, until her agent told her she had had an offer of a slot at Teviot’s Turret room, at the top of the newly-revamped student union-turned-Fringe venue.

“My agent told me it was going to be in a turret and I thought, ‘classic. Why not, I’ll take it?’,” she said. “I think it’s a nice hint, it’s a nice suggestion. But no-one really knows me from Traitors any more. When they do, I’m still thrilled to talk about it.”

The series was filmed in Ardross Castle in the Highlands.

“Scotland has a special place in my heart,” she said. “It’s been weird, coming back, even though Traitors wasn’t filmed in Edinburgh.”

Ms Byczkowski is in regular touch with Williams, who is from Edinburgh, as well as the two Traitors who made it to the final, Kieran Tompsett and Wilfred Webster.

In a dramatic twist in the series finale, Tompsett was voted out of the castle, leaving a “parting gift” by encouraging the remaining contestants to look towards Webster, who was eventually ousted in the final round of the game.

“It’s funny, because I would have happily been a Traitor,” she said, recalling that she had told host Claudia Winkleman before the show that that would have been her preference. “You have that permission to be a bit dastardly and mean and cut-throat. But it’s actually really difficult to be a Faithful too, when you get to know people to accuse them and vote them out.”

Killer is on at 5.10pm at Turret at Gilded Balloon Teviot every day until 30 August.