HORATIO CLARE: The Traitors taught us that what we have in common is vastly greater than anything that divides us

The firelight flickered, the nation leaned forwards and Claudia’s fringe was the curtain in the greatest national theatre event of the year: ‘Now we’re all together, shall we find out... what you all are?’

We watched in grand drawing rooms and bedsits, in the cabs of trucks in lay-bys, in NHS wards and, I bet you anything, in Royal palaces.

Even our august news institutions gave it due deference – who’d have thought that Radio 4’s Today programme would lead with the astonishing phenomenon that was The Celebrity Traitors?

It came to its climax on Friday night, when the nation was all here, all together, hanging on the next words.

Which – in an age of siloed TV viewing, where your cherished, must-watch series means nothing to the person beside you – is a rare and delightful feat of communality.

And the genius of it was that while we knew what those words were, the remaining players did not. This was dramatic irony of a terrifyingly British kind.

Comedian Romesh Ranganathan and actor Sebastian Croft celebrate winning Celebrity Traitors on Friday with host Claudia Winkleman

The lady who has become theatrical legend by shouting ‘He’s lying!’ at Iago in a Stratford production of Shakespeare’s Othello was every one of us now. England versus Argentina in the World Cup might as well have been a century ago.

This was television of a completely different order.

It was Maya Jama who revealed herself first – fittingly, given she is a woman who started life in a poor family from the rough end of Bristol and became a star by guts, talent and hard graft.

Britain has not been having the happiest time in our history in the last few years. We all know about the problems, the inequalities, costs and divisions between us.

But now we united in exactly the same feelings. We knew Maya would say, ‘I am, and have always been… a Traitor!’ but how would the show’s Faithful winners, Sebastian ‘Bash’ Croft and Romesh Ranganathan, take it?

Romesh, whose strength of character makes him harder to read than some of the other players, and whose authenticity is irresistible, was appalled.

Bash, with whom I would like to go interrailing, whose face seems to light up with each successive feeling, clenched his fist: ‘I’m so glad!’ We rejoiced with him – Maya and King Kenny had tried to frame him and this was truth triumphing over falsehood.

But what was so beautiful in these moments, notwithstanding the helicopters, explosions, dune buggies and severed heads of the plot so far, was not the cliched Hollywood ending, the victory of ‘good’ over ‘bad’. It was far more interesting. The beauty and power of the series were the smiles and the delight, the relief and the friendship between the players, and all of us at home.

We have all fallen a bit in love with them over the series – how could we not? It is not a question of which one you prefer: the point, we learned, is that elements of all of us make up all of them. We have all been Kenny with that crashing slip, ‘Speaking as a Traitor…!’ And yet somehow we have survived such blunders.

We have all been James Blunt, the star failure (I think James is my spirit animal). How very well we know that feeling when the more you protest your innocence, the more guilty you look and even feel. We watched conviction draining out of him, being replaced by that familiar hopelessness of being not believed.

We have all tried too hard, like Joe Lycett and Miranda Hart, so excited and delighted by an event that we somehow overshoot it.

We have been as sensitive as Michael Sheen, the show’s global star, who sagely played a modest version of himself, fitting into the common endeavour.

And, as Richard E Grant demonstrated in episode one, we have blurted out truth because it is true, and because someone has asked for it – and seen it land terribly.

‘I’m a Traitor!’ he declared in a moment that, impossibly, surpassed his fame as Withnail, star of my generation’s favourite film.

Withnail And I is about a liar, cad and failure who is also comic, lovable and beautiful: a very British hero, both Faithful and Traitor. My own hero in the series was Bash.

After he had triumphed in the most dramatic and demanding task he said: ‘It feels like the little gay kid in me who was scared of doing masculine things like this has been healed.’

Jumping from choppers and blowing stuff up, Bash discovered his inner warrior.

Some of the greatest warriors in history have been gay, from Alexander the Great onwards. And the BBC, in pulling off this immaculately entertaining, unifying and thought-provoking series, fulfilled the Ancient Greeks’ fundamental principle for civilisation.

No town, city or society, they believed, could work without theatre. It was as essential as food to the happiness and success of a population that they should be able to gather together to see themselves represented on stage, in battle with the forces of life.

As we watched the Traitors lying and scheming, covering up and backpedalling, and the Faithfuls accusing and doubting, we understood that they had agendas and that they had no choice but to pursue them.

This was fate, a superbly manufactured version of the fates that play with us all today. I am on one side of many of the issues that divide us. You may be on the other.

But the lesson this human drama and all great drama teaches is that we are all on the same stage in the theatre of life, where what we have in common is vastly greater than anything that divides us.

The subtle, vital point of The Celebrity Traitors is that our agendas and beliefs and objectives may clash but we, personally, need not. Life and drama and this series ask that we grow as people, conquering ourselves rather than each other.

As the success of shows such as Big Brother and I’m A Celebrity have proved, we love to watch people under pressure, less to see if they will win or not than to witness something of ourselves in them, when their armour falls off.

There was no armour left at all around the final fire. ‘I’ve got to be the worst winner in the history of this entire game,’ said Romesh, as he and Bash fell into a hug. ‘Oh my God. Thank you man,’ he said, and I welled up.

Didn’t you? It was beautiful. It was headline news. It was everything we wanted, courtesy of TV genius and world class production by our old BBC.

‘To the Faithfuls!’ Yes indeed –and that would be all of us.