The cough on "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?"
Elstree, England, 2001
This case is a work of fiction. The characters, names, places and events in the game do not portray real people. The account below is a factual summary, based on public sources, of the case that served as inspiration.
On 9 September 2001, British Army major Charles Ingram took the contestant's chair on "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?", recorded at the Elstree studios near London. His wife, Diana, and her brother had already won £32,000 on the same show. On the first day of recording, Ingram used two of his three lifelines and stopped at the £4,000 question; nobody in the production team expected him to go very far.
On the second day, he got every question right up to the top prize of £1 million, thinking aloud, leaning towards wrong options and changing his mind at the last moment. The production team grew suspicious: a sound technician rang the director of the production company Celador during the recording, the signed cheque was withheld and, when reviewing the tapes, the team linked the right answers to coughs coming from Tecwen Whittock, a Welsh university lecturer waiting his turn in one of the ten chairs of the selection round. Of the 192 coughs recorded, 19 were judged significant. The episode never aired, and the three were arrested on 22 November 2001.
Sources
In the game
Ahem
A TV studio on the outskirts of London, Tuesday, 4 September 2001, 11 pm. The stage of "The Million Ladder" is empty, and the contestant's chair is still slowly turning under the spotlights.
At the trial in Southwark, the prosecution showed records of calls between Diana's mobile and Whittock's. He blamed the coughing on rhinitis and a dust allergy, but the jury heard that it vanished when he himself sat in the contestant's chair. On 7 April 2003, the couple and the lecturer were convicted of obtaining a cheque by deception, with suspended prison sentences and fines, and Ingram left the Army. Journalists and a 2015 book questioned the verdict, but the conviction stood.
