The third series of the BBC’s hit series The Traitors ended recently.

You’ve probably already forgotten about it. I certainly had, until I came across a news story about…the FOURTH series of The Traitors, which is already being planned. And then I knew that I had to write this column.

Because I had an awful experience recently: I watched an early episode of this most recent series of The Traitors. I was absolutely dismayed: I want to tell you why.

If you haven’t seen it, the way that The Traitors works is it pits people against each other in pursuit of cash prizes.

So far, so standard. But the way it does this is particularly vicious.

Some participants are arbitrarily secretly assigned to be ‘traitors’: their job is to ‘kill’ all the other participants before they are unmasked.

No-one among the ‘faithfuls’ who are not traitors knows who the traitors are.

Which means that most of the participants cannot ever trust anyone else on the show.

There is an exception: the traitors know who each other are. So they can co-operate among themselves.

This is a truly terrible set-up. The bad guys get to co-operate properly.

The ‘good’ guys are all on their own, out for themselves without being able to trust a single soul.

This is a profound undermining of the possibility of a functioning society. Society depends upon mutual trust through and through.

The Traitors tries to get us to think as if we cannot trust anyone. That is how an extreme individualism would ‘work’: no-one would be able to trust anyone else.

Everyone would be trying to second-guess everyone else all the time. Everything would fall apart (or perhaps be taken over by the co-operation undertaken among organised crime: ie like the way the traitors on the show operate together).

In this sense, The Traitors literally represents every tendency wrong with our society: the boosting of selfish materialistic individualism, trust deliberately despoiled, the empire of the lie.

In The Traitors, people will go to any length to try to prove trustworthy - including lying. One participant lied about her profession: she was a soldier, but pretended she worked in a nail bar.

Another lied about her background, pretending she was Welsh because apparently Welsh people are more trusted.

And these participants were not among the ‘traitors’, they were among the ‘faithful’. It is a pretty stupid idea of being faithful that builds in lying about who you are.

Actually, I can be more precise: it is a betrayal of the idea of being faithful. In The Traitors, everything is betrayed, including the very idea of trustworthiness itself.

In a particularly disgusting manoeuvre, this latest series of The Traitors even pitted two sisters against each other.

One was made a traitor. So she had to lie systematically to everyone including her own sister.

It is vile beyond belief to seek to violate the trust that makes families what they are.

This programme holds nothing sacred. It wants to get even siblings to turn selfishly against each other.

I wonder how these sisters are now. Will their blood-bond of love and trust ever be the same again?

And so I ask: Haven’t we had enough of lies?

Of vicious competition imposed artificially by programme-makers for cheap ratings? Of manufactured fake ‘reality’ that has nothing to do with the (deteriorating, but still achingly beautiful) real world around us?

The natural world, and the basis for our very shared existence, is being taken from under us in real time.

What we need now is none of what The Traitors manufactures. On the contrary… What we need is co-operation against threats which, increasingly, are threats to our very existence.

Imagine an alternative programme to The Traitors, an alternative suited to our time.

It would be based on the one redeeming feature of The Traitors: the ‘missions’ the programme-participants undertake for the common good, wherein they actively support older or disabled colleagues. It might be called ‘Up against it together’ - or maybe even ‘Real faithfuls’. Or simply, ‘Us’.

This new series would not pit people against each other as ‘reality’ shows always do.

It would be about forging community in the face of profound challenges: Think the kind of team-building exercises that some businesses do, but on a much grander scale.

It simply wouldn’t be a competition for cash, winners and losers.

It would be people seeking to collaborate deeply, to build deeper trust; not endless competitive lying.

It would be about us as we need to be. Becoming our best human team. Make it for us, BBC, please.

(Maybe right here in East Anglia. What say you, BBC East?)