The three-part drama writer James Graham and actress Helen McCrory also speak. Production airs on ITV on April 13. Check out the new still on our gallery and read the full interview below:
Some cultural prompts become hardwired. Hear “Ask the audience”, “Phone a friend” or “50:50” and most likely your subconscious will respond with the melodramatic sound effects and swooping lights of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? Read the words “coughing major” and you’ll probably think of the fidgety, stiff-shirted bumbler Charles Ingram, who went on to win the £1m prize.
Except, of course, he didn’t. Ingram had a plant called Tecwen Whittock in the audience who was coughing (the “coughing major” actually didn’t do any coughing) to tell him which of the multiple-choice answers was correct. Anyone who heard the playback could hear it clear as a bell, as Martin Bashir’s documentary A Major Fraud — made by ITV, complete with assumptive title, and watched by a remarkable 17 million viewers in 2003 — showed.
“It was a heist story about the most popular game show of all time,” says James Graham, who was so captivated by the tale that he wrote a play, Quiz, and now a three-part TV series of the same name, about the case of the coughing major. Michael Sheen, in another of his unnervingly flawless character melts, plays the show’s ringmaster, Chris Tarrant, all meringue hair and slick suits. Matthew Macfadyen is Charles Ingram, Sian Clifford his wife, Diana, Mark Bonnar plays Paul Smith, the executive producer of Millionaire, and Stephen Frears directs. But the real star of the show is the show itself — it is a startling reminder of just how big Millionaire was 20 years ago.
“It was like TV crack,” says Sheen, speaking from Wales via video link. “The thing that first struck me about it then was that it was on every night — I thought, ‘What could possibly justify that?’ It must signify something important or amazing. But a quiz show? Then, watching it, you got it immediately. When I was watching it, nothing could pull me away, and as soon as it finished I would want to watch the next one. It was addictive. I’d never seen a quiz show like that.”
Neither had the public. Millionaire was an instant smash hit. At one point it was reaching 19 million viewers — royal wedding or World Cup final numbers. Yet, just as there was something markedly British about its success (it was developed to incorporate the dynamic of the pub quiz, a British invention that surged in popularity in the 1980s and 1990s), so there was something very British about the scandal that surrounded it in late 2001.
In the preceding years a community of obsessive quizzers (Graham calls them “the syndicate”) had become determined to hack the show. They began to formalise their operation, exploiting vulnerabilities in the selection process and pooling information on the questions ITV was using to filter applicants by phone and pager. As the contestants became more and more white, middle-class and home counties-based, ITV began to suspect that it was being outflanked.
So when a middle-class army major, Charles Ingram — whose wife had already been on the show and won £32,000 — turned up with a series of outrageous U-turns, guesses and flukes (“The most amazing contestant we have ever had,” Tarrant said that night) ITV was determined to get itself a scalp.
Graham’s television adaptation is based on his play insofar as it takes the established view, the one supported by the courts, that the Ingrams were guilty as sin — and then, subtly and persuasively, he proposes a counter-narrative.
At the end of the 2017 play’s two acts there was an “ask the audience” electronic vote. Were the Ingrams guilty of stealing a huge amount of money from ITV or were they innocent?
“The audience always went with guilty,” says Graham. “But normally, at the end of the second act, people would switch and go back to innocent.”
The TV adaptation attempts a similar counter-argument, which comes mainly in the third episode. Helen McCrory, as Charles Ingram’s barrister, Sonia Woodley QC, is its main proponent.
“Most people’s view is based on the Martin Bashir documentary,” McCrory says. “The actual programme was never broadcast, so any footage people think they’ve seen is from that. In the documentary they isolate the coughs, and that was a big part of what convinced everyone the plot was real — because the coughs are so obvious. But of course they quietened down everyone else. What really comes out, therefore, is how that edit made all the difference.”
Quiz is co-produced by ITV and Left Bank Pictures, and distributed by Sony Pictures Television, Left Bank’s majority shareholder. Sony owns the rights to the Millionaire franchise, meaning the producers of Quiz were able to access the blueprints for the original sets and recreate them in their exact dimensions.
“What you realise when you go on that set,” Sheen says, “is that Tarrant and Tecwen are really close. Sitting there, I felt a) you’d have to be really careful not to be noticed and b) the audacity of it! Because Tecwen is literally in Tarrant’s eyeline. Ingram has his back to him, so it would be really hard to recognise that cough in among lots of other coughs — and that’s the other thing: if you heard the actual footage, people are coughing all over the place. So it made it seem unlikely to me either that you’d get away with it or that it would work at all.”
Although Tarrant is now convinced of the Ingrams’ guilt, he didn’t suspect anything at the time.
“I met him a couple of days after I’d finished filming,” says Sheen. “I was at the Pride of Britain awards and I heard this voice behind me saying, ‘Don’t look anything like me!’ And there he was. He was obviously interested about what was going to happen. I think he said, ‘I hope they don’t do anything silly like try to make it look like they didn’t do it.’ So it’s fairly clear which side he comes down on.”
As the writer of last year’s Brexit: The Uncivil War, Graham is the reigning champion of the populist dialectic. On the day we meet, the Ingrams themselves turn up on set to say hello and greet him warmly. He has also worked closely with Paul Smith, who first pitched the idea of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, and has managed to keep all of them on side.
“It’s such a wussy thing to say,” Graham says, “but the balance issue is something that really matters to me. Also I think it’s more exciting television if you’re being as fair to all sides as possible.”
What have the Ingrams said to him?
“They still completely maintain their innocence. Paul Smith is obviously completely convinced of their guilt. To be really honest the Ingrams aren’t going to like the first two episodes of this, because it’s pretty much going to be the perception of how they did it. Paul Smith probably isn’t going to enjoy the third episode, because we’re going to subvert that and ask questions about whether or not that was true. As long as everyone feels that way you’re being fair.”
One point Graham makes is that, in retrospect, the coughing major scandal marked the beginning of the end of this kind of fair appraisal, in which both sides of an argument get a fair hearing. (It’s a failure of discourse he knows well from his Brexit screenplay — “I’d expected people to argue about the content of the show, about what it was saying. I hadn’t for a second expected people to actually question the right of the show to exist.”)
Charles Ingram’s appearance on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? took place on September 9 and 10, 2001. The backdrop to what followed was the so-called “war on terror”, a moment in culture and news and politics when normal boundaries were starting to blur between reality and fiction, government and messaging.
“In retrospect it seems to speak to lots of things, like trial by television,” Sheen says. “Even though it was before the social media age, it’s the idea that these people’s guilt was determined by what the public felt about it and the way it was reported in the media. That’s gone on to gain greater significance.”
Graham goes further: “I do think this scandal is almost a bit of an origin story for how the next 15 years progressed towards a complete death of objective reality. The fact that it’s about a game show where there are right answers and there are wrong answers is perfect. We’ve seen the slow death of that ever since.”
Quiz is on ITV on April 13