THE COUGHING MAJOR
A sinister syndicate, a suspicious phone call... the story of the coughing major who cheated on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? is more complex than you think – and a new drama will make you question what you believed...
Remember when the cough was an innocent thing? And then a court decided it wasn’t. Long before our present travails there was another coughing scandal in which a humble – or maybe not-so-humble – tickle in the throat became the centre of an incredible court case.
The story of the ‘coughing major’, Charles Ingram, who was accused of trying to defraud hit quiz show Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? out of £1m in 2001, was a story so leftfield no dramatist would have dared invent it. Ingram, a major in the British Royal Engineers, his wife Diana and fellow quiz fan Tecwen Whittock, another contestant on the show, were accused of cheating. It was alleged that Tecwen had coughed at the right answer when Ingram, apparently stumbling and out of his depth, pondered out loud the questions, carefully naming each answer.
The story of the major and his wife, the aftermath of their appearance on the show and all the bits the public and even the television show producers were not aware of at the time, makes for an extraordinary three-part drama,
Quiz, on ITV, the channel on which much of the action took place.
‘I’d say this is the most British crime ever,’ says the show’s creator James Graham, who’s based the TV series on his acclaimed play of the same name. ‘In my head I’ve always framed it as Mission: Impossible but with middle-class people using quizzes to steal £1m.
‘It’s a story with no real bad guys. It’s also a very human tale that most people think they know. But when you see the series you might be shaken from your certainties. I wanted to examine something still pertinent today – the idea of truth and “post-truth” and how our preconceptions can be shattered.’ James, whose TV drama Brexit:
The Uncivil War had the dubious honour of making the UK aware of Dominic Cummings, was a fan of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? when it first aired in 1998. ‘I was 16 and watched it with my grandparents,’ he recalls. ‘Like the rest of the nation I was embroiled from the start. It wasn’t just that they were giving away a million pounds, it was the whole drama of it, the real people it featured and how it changed their lives.’
‘One of the first episodes had a girl saving up for her wedding. I cried; I couldn’t believe my emotional investment in this stranger and her wedding. We’ve featured that contestant on our show. I remembered it so vividly, I wanted to show it to the world.’
The series reveals how the show came to be made – with Paul Smith (Mark Bonnar), the boss of production company Celador having to use his house as equity if it was a failure. Within days of airing, the show – which was not only the first to offer £1m but also to be shown nightly across the week, allowing the tension to build – had garnered huge audiences, which rose to 19m. A third of the British public was watching and the idea was exported all over the world, including Ireland. ‘One of the challenges of the drama was recommunicating to both an audience that is overly familiar with it, and to a younger audience who maybe haven’t engaged with it, just how shocking it was,’ says James. ‘The idea
QUIZ MASTERS: Diana (Fleabag’s Sian Clifford) and Charles celebrate their win they were possibly going to give away a million pounds with just questions and answers.’
Diana Ingram, a preschool worker, and her businessman brother Adrian Pollock, both huge quiz fans, were obsessed with the show. Separately, they ended up in the hot seat winning £32,000 apiece. Then they decided Charles – who wasn’t a quiz fan – should have a go at winning the biggest prize of all. But by the time he appeared on the show in September 2001, ITV executives had already become concerned at just how white and middle-class the contestants had become – and how they all appeared to be from southern England. Already suspicious, they were surprised when Ingram became the third member of his family to compete in the quiz proper. ‘What they didn’t know then – and we only really learned the full extent when we were researching the series – was that there was a group of people called the Consortium,’ reveals James. ‘There were hundreds of them, signed up by a quizmaster called Paddy Spooner.
‘Paul Smith, in particular, was intrigued by how much this strange organisation had got inside his show. They’d managed to win a sizeable chunk of prize money from the show and we were all staggered to hear exactly how much – which we reveal in the third episode.
‘They were a professional outfit and would only accept you into the group if you were good enough – and if you paid a fee. They’d help people get on the show by manipulating the phone lines then train them on how to be quickest on ‘fastest finger first’, the initial round that gets a contestant into the main game. When it came to Phone A Friend, they’d divert your call to a special room where they’d gathered some of the best quizzers in the land.’ If a member helped answer a question correctly, they received a share of the winnings.
Charles and Diana weren’t part of the group, but knew some of them. And one name that was familiar was that of Tecwen. It was common on the show for a contestant’s turn to run over into the next day of filming – and that happened to Charles. When, after his first day of recording the show, the Ingrams heard that Tecwen, who they had never met but had heard of through quizzing circles, was going to be among the new contestants hoping to win fastest finger once Charles had finished his turn in the hot seat, Diana made a fateful phone call.
She claimed it was a friendly call ahead of Tecwen’s first appearance, but the prosecution claimed the conversation formed the basis of their plot to defraud the show. Tecwen’s proximity to the main contestant – the fastest finger hopefuls formed a circle around the stage – meant he was in a prime position to communicate to Charles. ‘Diana said she regretted making that call,’ says James. ‘We’ll never know exactly what was said.’
The first episode of the series shows how the Ingrams were a very normal family – even if Diana and Adrian were quiz fanatics. Part two
IT’S A STORY WITH NO REAL BAD GUYS. IT’S ALSO A VERY HUMAN TALE