ITV have dramatised the infamous coughing scandal that rocked its own flagship quiz show Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? during the early Noughties.
Succession’s Matthew Macfadyen plays the so-called ‘Coughing Major’ Charles Ingram, Sian Clifford plays his wife Diana Ingram, and Michael Sheen plays quiz show host Chris Tarrant.
But what was the real-life story behind the scandal? Read on for everything you need to know about the history behind Quiz.
Who were Charles and Diana Ingram?
Major Charles Ingram and his wife, Diana Ingram, are a married couple with three children, and both were convicted of attempting steal a million pounds by deception on the ITV quiz show Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?, alongside accomplice Tecwen Whittock.
Charles was an army major until he was forced to resign his commission in 2003.
Before Charles appeared on the show in September 2001, Diana and her brother, Adrian Pollock, were both huge fans of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?, presented by Chris Tarrant. At one stage during 1999, the show was watched by a third of the British population.
Diana and Adrian were both determined to appear as contestants – Adrian even built a replica “fastest finger” machine to practise on, and Diana started collating a book with tips on how to get onto the show.
Both siblings eventually appeared separately in the contestant chair, and each won £32,000 on the show.
When was Charles Ingram on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? Did he cheat?
Major Charles Ingram appeared on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? on the 9th and 10th September 2001 (just before 9/11 in the US), and he went on to win the grand prize.
His performance was surprising in many ways, not least because he appeared to keep changing his mind to the correct answer at the very last minute. For one question where the correct answer was the singer Craig David, Charles initially said that he had never heard of him – before switching to Craig David.
Discussing Charles Ingram’s performance on the show, Quiz writer James Graham exclusively told RadioTimes.com: “He behaved quite strangely in that chair, he played the game like no one has ever played that game before, and I still watch it and go, ‘What are you doing? Why are you convinced that it’s one thing, and then you change your mind to another answer?’
“He [Charles Ingram] would argue it’s one of the tactics that Diana wrote about in her book, that it’s very useful strategy to be really entertaining, because they [the Ingrams] believed that the producers would give you easier questions if you were a really big, good character.
“And another strategy was that you had to control the pace, so Chris Tarrant is trying to get you to answer at a certain pace, and that what Charles was doing was to try to take control of that and use it to create some thinking time. That may be true, that may not be true, but I accept that everybody at the time thought that he was behaving really strangely.”
Today, many people have seen clips of the performance on YouTube, or while watching Martin Bashir’s 2003 documentary Major Fraud – during which you can hear Tecwen Whittock coughing and allegedly alerting Charles to the right answers.
Graham, who has met the real-life Ingram’s, said, “I really loved meeting them, because they were so iconic in my head, having watched that YouTube clip of the Major’s performance so many times, and then you meet them and they suddenly become three dimensional.”
Was the ‘Coughing Major’ Charles Ingram innocent?
The Ingrams and alleged accomplice Whittock were found guilty on 7th April 2003, following a trial at Southwark Crown Court where they were defended by Sonia Woodley QC.
To this day, the Ingrams have publicly maintained their innocence.
Fleabag actress Sian Clifford, who plays Diana Ingram in ITV’s Quiz, said during a press event that she believed that the Ingram trial in the early Noughties was an “open and shut case”.
Graham told RadioTimes.com, “I remember seeing that trial unfold when I was a student up at Hull university when I was 18,19, and watching the documentary the Martin Bashir documentary Major Fraud after they were found guilty, and was just completely captivated by just the idea of basically a robbery but of a game show, a million pounds in front of a live studio audience and TV cameras, and just the audacity of that I thought was so incredible.
“And I thought, probably like the rest of the country still does that… they were completely guilty.”
However, Graham has told RadioTimes.com that he has “doubts” about the jury’s findings, pointing, for example, to ITV’s “manipulat[ion]” of the episode recording in order to isolate the coughs for the jury. That same version (with the very loud, isolated coughs) is the one that the population has also watched and heard in various documentaries and series.
“There were so many things that I found extraordinary about the case that don’t make sense,” Graham said. “The fact that the three of them had never met, the Ingrams and Tecwen Whittock, [they] had never spent any time in a room with each other, and only had one phone call that lasted eight minutes, as fans of the show who discovered they were gonna be on the same programme together.
“The fact that he [Whittock] has a diagnosed cough, he has an asthmatic condition that he can’t control. Would you pick someone who has an uncontrollable cough to cough at specific moments, during a really tense game show? Maybe you wouldn’t.”
What happened to Charles and Diana Ingram after Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?
Discussing the aftermath of the TV appearance and trial, Graham said that “the impact on their [the Ingrams’] life and their family was extraordinary”.
He continued, “They lost their reputation, the Major was kicked out of the army, they went bankrupt I think – I think now they’ve been made bankrupt four times. You might argue that the scale of that, given that essentiality it is a game show, nobody died, there are no murderers in this story, I question the scale of the impact on their lives, compared to the crime.”
Sian Clifford told members of the press that “it wasn’t hard to empathise” with the real-life Charles and Diana Ingram.
“You don’t need to dig very deep to find out what happened to them,” she said. “I mean, they were persecuted and harassed by the press but also by the public, their pet animals were all attacked, their dog was killed, I mean it’s pretty gruesome. Their children were bullied so much they had take them out of school.
“It’s quite extreme, and so it wasn’t hard to empathise, honestly. [It was] pretty rough going, and you see a lot more of that part of the tale in the episode three. It’s very focussed on the family, and it was really emotional for me to watch it, it was really emotional for us to film those scenes. Yeah, it’s pretty shocking.”
Quiz will begin on Monday 13th April at 9pm on ITV
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