Michael *cough* Sheen is Chris *cough* Tarrant in Quiz *cough*.
A daring new drama questions everything we know about the Millionaire coughing scandal
In 2001, Major Charles Ingram, his wife Diana and their friend Tecwen Whittock were accused of cheating their way to a million pounds on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire. The Major was a contestant on the show, and Mrs Ingram and Whittock were in the audience, apparently conspiring to signify the correct answers to him via a series of coughs. now writer James Graham, who wrote the controversial Brexit TV drama with Benedict Cumberbatch as Leave campaign supremo Dominic Cummings, has turned his own stage play about the Millionaire scandal into a three-part drama for ITV. He describes it as “an origin story of fake news and the end of a shared truth”. It’s at once a high-stakes story about justice and the fate of normal people thrown into the media glare, and a playfully enjoyable caper.
“The driving force is narrative and plot”, Graham tells us while we visit the set near Pinewood, west London. “We tried to make it a light entertainment [show] about light entertainment, and event TV about event
TV; it is a flash-bang-wallop ITV drama but we’re using that form to try to manipulate the viewers to think about how they judge people, and how they decide what ‘truth’ is”.
So while the Ingrams and Whittock were found guilty of deception, Graham is trying to be scrupulously fair in untangling a complex set of circumstances, just as he did with Brexit: An Uncivil War. “Even if you think they’re guilty you might have empathy for them,” he points out. “And when you stack up all the evidence, there are a lot of gaps you have to fill in order to find them guilty. There is enough doubt about the certainty of that guilty verdict”.
The drama’s cast found themselves pondering the issue of the Ingrams’ guilt throughout filming. Matthew Macfadyen, who plays Major Ingram, says, “I swing daily between thinking they’d been heartbreakingly mistreated and then wondering if they did it. It’s all about what we project on to them”. Sian Clifford, who plays Diana Ingram, has been through all the possible permutations of what exactly the couple did. “ITV sent a recording of the show to the police before the trial and I watched it on repeat. I messaged Matthew saying, ‘I’m convinced they didn’t do it’. Then we went into the studio to recreate the episode of Millionaire and we watched isolated clips over and over to get them right, and I swung back the other way”.
Now, though, Clifford is firm in her belief that there wasn’t enough evidence to convict. Helen Mccrory, who takes the key role of the Ingrams’ legal counsel, Sonia Woodley QC, tells us, “I play Sonia as if she thinks the Ingrams are innocent. But the story is also about being under the glare of the press, and how important its power is in judging you. People are constantly getting convicted by the public in a trial by media”.
Helping to turn this rich material torn form real life into a piece of prestige drama is director Stephen Frears, whose last TV work was A Very English Scandal, another finely honed true story. Graham talks about Frears’ unique skill in juggling big ideas while establishing a frothy, jaunty tone. “He directs with a cinematic sense of mischief while handling the weight [of the story] as well. He has that mix of heft and lightness”. Mccrory remembers how she planned to meet the real Sonia Woodley for the role, until Frears told her not to bother. “Stephen trusts everyone to get on with it,” she explains. “He trusts actors to make things up. And the script’s idea is that your narrative is being written by forces you don’t control”. As for that playful tone, Macfadyen says it “allows the drama to suggest certain things that you can’t do if it was po-faced and serious”. As if to underline just how breezy the style of the series is, there’s even a song and dance routine, about which Macfadyen won’t say much apart from nodding and conceding, “Yes, that did happen”.
This daring musical interlude is indicative of Graham’s ballsy storytelling which, combined with Frears’ mischievous tone, and a cast gathered from only the finest of recent series
(Peaky’s Mccrory,
Succession’s Macfadyen,
Fleabag’s Clifford, and of course Michael Sheen, most recently seen in Good Omens, magically transformed into Chris Tarrant), puts this drama series firmly in the Peak TV bracket. For a show all about questioning ideas of certainty, there’s no doubting its thrilling quality.