Marjorie Pennick

Marjorie Pennick is 66 and a retired woman and fan of the show. Short and plump, with a round, ruddy face, white hair set with hairspray and reading glasses hanging on a little chain, she is talkative and curious, calls everyone young man and has known every contestant of the show since the premiere. She comes to every recording she can, and says an audience is better than television, and free.

She lives in a light brick semi-detached house on the outskirts of London, with a living room of flowered wallpaper, doilies on every surface, a porcelain teapot with a chipped lid, an old television on a wooden cabinet and framed photos of grandchildren that she rearranges every week. She wakes early, does crosswords in pencil and chats aloud with whoever passes on the sidewalk.

She wears a lilac wool scarf and a beige cardigan buttoned to the top, and carries on her lap a big leather handbag with a cloth handkerchief poking out. Her nose is red from a cold, she coughs softly and apologizes whenever she clears her throat. When someone speaks to her, she tilts her head to the side like someone listening to a record.

About tonight, her account is the usual one: what she does every week is cheer. She knows the name of everyone who has ever sat in that chair, and thought the coordinator a rushed girl, poor thing. Of the captain, yesterday, she says he was a disaster who burned two lifelines and nearly left with four thousand. Today, he seemed a different man, he read the options slowly, one by one, and waited.

When the question suggests she coughed on purpose to help the captain, Marjorie answers that she has had a cold since Sunday and coughed into her handkerchief all night, and tells the detective to ask her doctor. She wraps the lilac scarf around her neck and calls the detective young man, and the doubt remains: the indignation of a lady with the flu or the sweetness of someone who knows how to be heard?