Halloween has become big business, and Celebrity Traitors proves it. But this cultural obsession reveals something very wrong with the British economy, writes Matt Kenyon

Just after 8pm last Saturday, it struck me that every single person on the Northern line train to Tooting was not just in a Halloween costume, but in an elaborate Halloween costume. We’re not talking about low-effort zombie boys with muscle-revealing t-shirt rips, or girls dressed as scary bunnies. 

Instead, the carriage was full of high effort, expensive and self-consciously un-flattering garb. Costumes that wouldn’t have looked out of place at Maya Jama’s Halloween party. This weekend, the ascendant TV star underwent a full transformation, helped by an extensive team, to become the spitting image of Olympic gold medalist and national treasure Mo Farah. Jama proved that a step-change is complete: People are willing to put major effort, imagination and funds into dressing up for Halloween. 

And I mention Maya Jama because she is becoming a fully-fledged national treasure herself, following a barnstorming run on Celebrity Traitors. The game show format rivals Strictly and the World Cup with 10m+ viewership figures straight out of the 20th century. Surely, no media watcher a decade ago could have predicted that an elevated parlour game could so totally capture the public imagination. 

But, perversely, the strength of our finest TV format reveals a weakness in our economy: Brits are indulging in a world of pretend. The seemingly unending economic good times of the 2000s gave us a taste for the glossless, ultra-realism of Big Brother. Now, with an economy on the brink of calamity, we want precisely the opposite. 

Britain descends into fantasy-land

It’s a pattern that crops up over time. At the close of the 1970s, that decade of high inflation with so many parallels to now, Brits could look to Rocky Horror and Adam and the Ants, whose vivid colours could distract from power cuts and rubbish piling up outside. The Winter of Discontent spurred on the birth of Punk and New Wave in its wake.

A little further back, London had a particular costume moment in the mid 18th century, as the city was gripped by the devastating “gin craze” that would ultimately halve its birth rate. The ‘Masquerade Mania’ centred around subversive, cross-class gatherings in big London venues, slammed by cultural critics for drunkenness and degeneracy. 

Back to 2026, and that cultural mishmash of masquerade and mischief is firmly back in. My colleague Anna wrote a great dispatch from a Renaissance Faire, where the open displays of ‘Furry’ sub-culture could not overshadow the truly mainstream status of high fantasy at its climactic masked ball – powered by the unquestionable goldmine that is ‘Romantasy’. 

And I have spent an unnerving chunk of the last year delving into the commercial success surrounding our current fantasy boom, from Dungeons and Dragons to a trading card convention that spanned much of the Excel Centre. It means that I will be on the Comic Con press email list forever, but more importantly signals that there is serious money in escapism.

And that’s serious money that isn’t necessarily being spent on house deposits, or invested in the FTSE 100. It’s a phenomenon that Leonard Lauder, the former chair of Estee Lauder, dubbed the ‘Lipstick Effect’. When the expected ladder of purchases – a holiday, a car, a property – is suddenly kicked away by deflated wages and poor growth, dopamine boosting luxuries are put on the menu. 

We are doom-spending

The impulse to spend is a strange kind of commercial self-soothing, which has fueled an experience economy peddling £300 concert tickets to a generation of forever renters. Glastonbury tickets sold out in 40 minutes in the year that prices breached £400. 

The effect is magnified in the US, which just delivered a comprehensive rebuke to its unpopular President. Just because consumer confidence is low, it doesn’t necessarily put a lid on frivolous consumer spending. And booming consumer spend does nothing to stem inflation.

We’ve seen this all over the place. Apple has set an iPhone sales record this year, even with the price of its latest models starting well in advance of £1,100 (with its foldable Duo starting at a mind-boggling £1,999). This was, in part, helped by consistent warnings from the press that prices would go up for consumers who waited too long to upgrade their phones. 

But Halloween costumes are, surely, the ultimate example of this effect: Elaborate, one-use, unrepeatable. While the pressure to meet social media body image ideals is well-chronicled, who complains of the peer pressure to go all in on Halloween? One social media creator spent hours with make up artists perfecting her Halloween look, an uncanny Jeremy Clarkson. And the clip of her, flanked by Hammond and May, striding down the Top Gear test track has scored more than 16m views on Instagram. 

Britain is enchanted by make-believe, and the root cause is fairly prosaic. It’s all very well to get stuck into London 2012 in a world of zero interest rates and solid wage growth, or to boogie to Britpop at the End of History. But now, in a zombie economy, it is not surprising that the public are keener to play in the world of the undead. And our Halloween parties mark the eve of an economic winter.