'Coughing major' case not black and white, says Quiz writer

The screenwriter behind a new drama based on the Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? coughing scandal has revealed he has doubts over whether Charles Ingram and his wife were guilty of cheating and said class and their accents may have contributed to their vilification.

The British army major was convicted alongside his wife, Diana, after a court ruled that he won the £1m prize in 2001 with help from a fellow contestant, Tecwen Whittock, using a series of strategic coughs to indicate the correct answer.

In an interview with Radio Times, the writer James Graham said the fact the couple were “relatively privileged, white and middle class” made them “perfect tabloid fodder” for people to project hatred towards.

“Obviously all three were found guilty,” Graham said. “But the story isn’t as clear cut as the majority of people think. Whether they did it or they didn’t do it, I think what happened in the studio that night isn’t black and white. There is new evidence and other older evidence that hasn’t really been presented to the public before and it points towards the Ingrams’ innocence.”

Graham, who has adapted his play Quiz into a drama for ITV starring Matthew Macfadyen and Sian Clifford, said the Ingrams and Whittock never spent any time together and had only had one eight-minute phone call before the show.

“He’s in the military, so there’s an air of privilege around them but also, maybe, gullibility, or innocence and naivety,” added Graham. “And that makes them ripe for the media to enjoy putting them in the stocks and throwing vegetables at them. I think one of the things we want to question is whether the mockery and humiliation they endured was proportionate to what they were accused of doing. A million pounds is serious, of course, but it’s also just a game. Nobody died.”

He said Whittock’s cough was a result of an asthmatic condition. “Would you pick someone who has an uncontrollable cough to cough at specific moments, during a really tense gameshow? Maybe you wouldn’t,” said Graham.

The Peaky Blinders actor Helen McCrory, who features in Quiz as Sonia Woodley QC, the lawyer who defended Ingram, said she too felt uncertainty about the scandal.

“The fact that a lot of people at the time didn’t hear the cough … Chris Tarrant didn’t hear the cough, the person sitting opposite didn’t hear the cough, people either side didn’t hear the cough, yet for some reason he [Ingram] heard the cough,” she told the Mirror.

During his appearance on the quiz show, which aired in September 2001, Ingram at times wavered between possible answers, appearing to settle on one before switching to another.

After he won, the show’s production company, Celador, suspended payment of the prize after accusing him and his wife of defrauding the show along with Whittock.

Following a trial at Southwark crown court in 2003, the three defendants were convicted by a majority verdict and given suspended sentences and fined. Ingram was later forced to resign his commission as a major by the army board. Ingram was denied leave to appeal against his conviction in 2004.

Graham’s three-part drama Quiz starts on ITV on Monday 13 April.