The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
VICTORIA COREN MITCHELL HOW I SEE IT
My poker game with the ‘coughing major’ might shed light on his TV scandal…
When I played poker with Charles Ingram, the infamous “coughing major” from the Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? scandal of 2001, I thought he might be the biggest duffer I’ve ever met at the table. He made a move so terrible, so egregiously terrible, that it’s either the worst poker play I’ve ever witnessed or a magnificent piece of long-term strategy, softening me up for absolute bankruptcy if we ever meet again.
ITV’s three-part miniseries Quiz, the starry hit of this week, was a jolly and sympathetic take on the major’s £1million game show win and subsequent trial for deception. It kept open the possibility that he didn’t cheat, being simply a brilliant fellow who knew all the answers. Well, I’ll tell you my poker story and you be the judge.
It is the spring of 2004. The ground-breaking Late Night Poker has triggered a gaming craze around the world and I’m playing a tournament for Challenge TV called Celebrity Poker Club. It boasts a curious line-up including actors, writers, darts players, the ventriloquist Roger De Courcey, the sports promoter Barry Hearn, the drug smuggler Howard Marks, and “Bunter” Worcester, who is now the 12th Duke of Beaufort. Something of a mixed bag. But enough about Bunter.
Also in the mix are three notorious bad boys from that era: the dodgy derivatives broker Nick Leeson, the Big Brother villain
Nasty Nick Bateman, and Millionaire’s own Charles Ingram, ubiquitously known as the “coughing major” even though someone else did the actual coughing. Everyone is keen to see how these contestants, all associated one way or another with cheating, will fare in a game where deceit is actively encouraged.
And this is how Major Ingram fares:
At a crucial moment in the match he decides, most bravely, to run a massive bluff against the snooker hero Steve Davis. Steve is one of the strongest opponents in the field, having played poker for many years in home games and at casinos, with friends and professionals, in tournaments of all sizes.
Nevertheless, the gutsy major chooses his moment and bluffs with absolute conviction. In this variant of the game, you get four chances to bet. Like a real poker champion, Ingram bets strongly at the first three opportunities, over and over again, despite having nothing at all.
Unfortunately, “on the river”, just before the fourth betting round, he turns his cards face up in the middle of the table. Steve Davis, the other players and the audience can all see that Ingram’s got nothing.
The tournament director points out that the hand is not finished, there is further betting to be done. Obediently, the major turns his cards face down again and moves all-in. He bets every chip he’s got.
For Steve Davis, this is not a difficult call.
So, is it more likely that Major Ingram is a quiz genius, or someone who got tangled up in a clownish coughing scam and then fumbled it by pressing on too far when he was obviously beaten? I know what a statistician would say.
Having said that, I feel guilty taking the mick. Beautifully played by Matthew Macfadyen, in a shining cast that also featured a great performance from Helen McCrory as the defence barrister and a typically delightful turn from Michael Sheen as Chris Tarrant, Charles Ingram emerged from Quiz as a terribly likeable and sympathetic fellow who really might have been innocent. Probably not, but one liked him anyway and rooted for him to be happy.
Indeed, as he pressed clumsily on towards the million-pound prize when it would have been far less suspicious to duck out at £250,000, one found oneself willing him to cheat better!
It was a hugely enjoyable miniseries, I thought, despite being all about coughing. Bit of a busman’s holiday for us there, eh? When McCrory called a “coughing expert” to the stand, I thought: “I suppose we need to train up about 600,000 more of those.”
The director of Quiz, Stephen Frears, is very good at this sort of thing. As in his 2006 film The Queen and his 2018 Jeremy Thorpe miniseries A Very English Scandal, the show simply took an interesting bit of modern history and performed it. The actors played out a string of events we’re familiar with – in my case deeply familiar; you won’t find anything closer to my frame of reference than the story of an old poker opponent cheating on a TV quiz – and yet, despite its relentless move towards an entirely familiar conclusion, the series was so tense! So gripping!
It was aided by some clever use of later context. One character introduced a debate about the grandstanding of the police, who’d performed an unnecessary dawn raid on Ingram’s house and tipped off the press. Another talked about facts, manipulation and “the bottom falling out of the truth market”. And episode three involved widespread anonymous trolling of the Ingram family. This stuff felt like a wink to the future – it smacked of the Leveson Inquiry, the Trump administration and Twitter – yet also felt highly appropriate and thematically powerful.
The series also got close to the truth about quizzers, both our quizzy nation in general and that particular subset of us who are obsessed with the pastime. This is my world and I recognised it.
As Mark Bonnar said, giving an excellent performance as the head of the production company that launched Millionaire, “People love a good pub quiz. It’s a uniquely British invention, combining our two greatest loves: drinking and being right.”
As Ingrams pressed clumsily on in Quiz, I found myself willing him to cheat better