As England prepare for their first match in the Nations Championship against South Africa and The Celebrity Traitors returns to our screens, Joe Marler – recently central to both – joins us for a chat about player welfare, Stephen Fry’s slang and the importance of men looking out for each other.How much did you plan your exit route from rugby? Did your post-rugby career just fall into place? “I would say my post-rugby experiences have followed my rugby experiences in the sense that I winged it for 17 years and continue to wing it now. There’s a distinct lack of planning on my behalf. I’m just very fortunate that I’ve got some lovely people around me who are far more intelligent and attentive to detail, and navigate me in the right ways.”You can’t wing being a world-class prop. You must have known you were very, very good. “I was half-decent at what I did, but I was world-class at making other people bad at it. It was a combination of being too lazy to get any better and knowing my limit. A proper player, like Owen Farrell, loved the sport, did everything and it became his life. I was more interested in having fun and enjoying myself. I hit my ceiling and went: ‘Well, I’m not really gonna get much better than this. I know what I can do and what I can’t, and I just continue to wing it until people find out.’”So, you were a disrupter, stopping other people doing what they want to do? “My ex-teammates and my employers would probably still use that word to describe me.”Joe Marler played for England 95 times. Photograph: Shaun Botterill/Getty ImagesYou kept an unusually low profile on The Celebrity Traitors and nearly won it.“I had an advantage in that most of them didn’t know who I was, so they semi-forgot I was there, which bought me a couple of days’ grace from being killed, then I was fortunate on the days I won shields, so it all fell into place. A hybrid of being dumb and being able to play dumber than I am got me as far as it did – plus my competitive nature. I seemed to be one of the few people actually interested in trying to win, as opposed to a lot of the chin-wagging: ‘Oh, darling, do you remember that party we went to?’ ‘Hang on,’ I thought ‘we’re trying to play a bloody game here.’”It was a shame we didn’t get to see those fascinating celebrity conversations.“Well, I think they’d be fascinating to the point of how mundane they were! There’s all these superstars and they sit down having a chat like normal friends catching up. One that I would have loved them to show was a brilliant conversation over lunch off-screen between Cat Burns and Stephen Fry about different LGBTQ slang and role-play names. I sat there being educated but trying to chip in as much as I could. Cat was saying: ‘Oh, you’d be more of a dom femme.’ I’m like: ‘What’s the dom femme?’ We talked about pillow princesses, all this different language.”You’d be a bear, wouldn’t you?