News Spike: The Game Theory of Cash Mountain

Wednesday, 6 May 2020

The Game Theory of Cash Mountain

“Normal People Don’t Play Like This.”

“There are some questions you should just know The Answer to.”

"An algebraic equation is a balance of natural ratios that enables us to determine the values of unknown quantities within a mathematical whole, and the logic and behaviour of Truth and untruth in court equations behaves in the same way as the values of numbers in mathematical equations.

This correspondence with algebra is apparent in the behaviour of liars and hypocrites everywhere, who reverse the values of Truth in such disputes to achieve self-serving ends, thereby creating a mathematical balance problem which accords with the characteristics of a numerical equation.

In any court equation, one side is pretentious, which is often the most persuasive and easily conveyed interpretation of the evidence, and the other is the Truthful case, which is usually hard to fix without doing the algebra, hence the other case.

In criminal trial situations one side is in the right and the other is in the wrong. The wrong may be concealed by a dishonesty or by a conveyed ignorance, which has a traceable motivation behind it. The equation is a balance between innocence and some form of guilt, between the malicious and the benign.

In an adversarial court examination, an innocent person usually finds it difficult to relate to a prosecution case against him, and he is recognisable for a willingness to make admissions and confirm points that may appear to be incriminatory to the prosecution case, without his having to do so and without his realising that he has done so.

The innocent are naive, and they tend to see their salvation through The Truth regardless of how things are misinterpreted by the prosecution.

Another factor that can identify a benign or innocent party is a difficulty in explaining or making sense with his testimony, especially if his testimony is created or confounded by the malicious or dishonest factor in the equation.

In a completed equation, the algebra should reveal a symmetrical whole in which the truth, the evidence, the fiction, the hypocrisies and their motives, should all be revealed in a logical relationship to each other.

The resolution of these equations should have all the facts seen in relation to the whole equation and the equation seen in relation to all the salient facts, with all their natural values resolved.

Algebra being what it is, the equation cannot possibly be completed erroneously if all the evidence and elements are accounted for.

The Memory's a funny thing - isn't it?

An incredible feat of engineering, it sits in the medial temporal lobe, and it's most impressive function is it's filing system.

It's better than anything a Supercomputer could do.

Another of my favourite facts - given that that's what this trial is all about : right answers, wrong answers, knowledge, Truth - is that, when we are remembering something, we're not actually recalling the original event.... What we are doing is remembering the last time we remembered it.

So we are CONSTANTLY wiping our pasts, and editing together a new one - one that makes sense to us NOW, in The Present.

All memories, therefore, are by definition : A Lie.

They change.
We change them.
Which isn't a crime, a conspiracy, just -- Human Nature.

We can project Guilt, say - back onto an event that was, in fact, perfectly innocent.

I'm asking you all to try and resist a more Entertaining Falsehood in favour of less-extraordinary Truth :

That Major Ingram simple knew the answers to those questions --
And that's Why He Got Them Right.

A miracle, my friend, is an event which creates faith.

That is the purpose and nature of miracles.

They may seem very wonderful to the people who witness them,

and very simple to those who perform them.

That does not matter :

if they confirm or create faith they are true miracles.

LA TRÉMOUILLE.

Even when they are frauds, do you mean?

THE ARCHBISHOP.

Frauds deceive.

An event which creates faith does not deceive: therefore it is not a fraud, but a miracle.

So I phoned a friend - part one

It's a devious, dog-eat-dog world in court - and that's just the press bench. But, at the Who Wants To Be A Millionaire trial, Jon Ronson thought he had the inside track - an old school connection, and he'd work it for all it was worth

Sat 19 Apr 2003 02.17 BSTFirst published on Sat 19 Apr 2003 02.17 BST

Eighteen months ago, when Major Charles Ingram, his wife Diana and another man, Tecwen Whittock, were charged with attempting to cheat the TV show Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? out of £1m using an elaborate system of audience-based coughs, my mother called me to say, "You know them! You were at school with them!"

"With who?" I asked.

"Diana Ingram's brothers, Adrian and Marcus Pollock," she said. "You must remember Diana Pollock. Their cousin Julian lived around the corner from us. You must remember them."

"No," I said.

The next day it dawned on me that this was an in money couldn't buy, so I wrote to the Ingrams, reminding them of our halcyon days together.

"My family and I are experiencing a very real nightmare," Charles wrote back. "I have no doubt that there is a case to prove against media manipulation after consideration of the content, its cyclical nature, the care taken to quickly undermine expressions of support, the outrageous leaking of privileged information, and so on." Charles wrote that perhaps I was the journalist to prove that case. I reread the letter. Its cyclical nature? It seemed curiously over-erudite, as if Charles wanted to prove that he was the sort of person clever enough to legitimately win £1m. I had no idea what he meant.

Still, it was odd. Diana, Adrian and Marcus Pollock attended the same synagogue I did. They were well-to-do in an ordinary way. What happened to them? I did, in fact, have some vague memory, some Pollock-related to-do that rocked the local Jewish community when I was about 10. It was something to do with a car with the number plate APOLLO G and the manufacture of watch straps. But I couldn' remember anything more than that, and neither could my mother. I decided to attendthe trial at Southwark crown court. Midway through, however, I was struck by another mystery. Why was this silly trial - in which almost everyone involved seemed to have their own crazy get-rich-quick scheme - happening at all?

Thursday afternoon, March 20 2003 is when it all goes wrong for Charles Ingram. He's being cross-examined by prosecuting barrister Nicholas Hilliard about Particular Coughs 12 to 14. Those of us who've attended this long, slow trial from the beginning know the coughs so well we can mouth them: the tape of Charles's appearance on Millionaire has been played nearly a dozen times. During Charles's tenure in the hot seat, 192 coughs rang out from the audience: 173 were, experts agree, innocent clearings of throats, etc. But 19 have been termed Particular Coughs.

Perhaps the most devastating of all is Particular Cough 12. It arose during Chris Tarrant's £500,000 question: "Baron Haussmann is best known for his planning of which city? Rome, Paris, Berlin, Athens."

"I think it's Berlin," Charles immediately, and confidently, replied. "Haussmann is a more German name than Italian or Parisian or Athens. I'd be saying Berlin if I was at home watching this on TV." This is when Cough 12 occurred. It sounds, from the tape, like a cough born from terrible frustration. If the prosecution case is true, the plan was for Charles to chew over the answers out loud and for Tecwen Whittock - sitting behind him in a Fastest Finger First seat - to cough after the correct one. But now it seemed that Charles was going to plump straight for Berlin.

"Cough, NO!"

(The first time this "No!" was played in court, every journalist and member of the public burst out laughing. Judge Rivlin threatened to clear the court.)

"I don't think it's Paris," he said.

"Cough."

"I don't think it's Athens."

No cough.

"I'm sure it's not Rome."

No cough.

"I would have thought it's Berlin but there's a chance it's Paris," said Charles. "Think, think! I think it's Berlin. It could be Paris. I think it's Paris."

"Cough."

"Yes," said Charles. "I am going to play..."

Now Nicholas Hilliard asks Charles why he changed his mind and opted for Paris.

"I knew that Paris was a planned city," explains Charles. "The centre of Paris was cleared of slums during the 19th century, and it was rebuilt into districts and boulevards. Prominent in my mind was the economic reason. In the middle of the 19th century France was coming out of the revolutionary period and it was decided, I think by Napoleon III, that he would concentrate on Paris and thereby the remainder of France would flourish."

Charles looks hopefully at the jury.

"But at the time," sighs Hilliard, "you said you thought it was Berlin because he had a German sounding name." There is a silence.

"Oh Mr Ingram," says Hilliard. "Surely you can help us a little bit better than that."

Judge Rivlin calls for a break. We all file out to the corridor. Charles looks shaken. He lights a cigarillo, his face beetroot and a picture of self-loathing. Nobody notices that he's wearing a Mensa badge. He put it on as a special touch, but it is so tiny - just a little M on his lapel - that the jury can't spot it.

"Hilliard has got me all tied up in knots," he says. "I just don't want to say anything stupid."

I do an upbeat smile, even though I believe that only a miracle can save them now.

"How does it feel to have to keep watching that tape?" I ask. I imagine it must be embarrassing. From the tape they look quite extraordinarily guilty, albeit in a sweet and funny way. It seems such a slapstick type crime - a half-baked plot executed badly.

"I still get a thrill," Charles replies, "when it gets to the part where I win a million."

Corridors outside courtrooms are exciting places. The players all stand together smoking cigarettes - defendants, barristers, clerks, ushers, solicitors, journalists, police and victims - as if there's a victim in this crime! Celador, the makers of Millionaire, have signed up almost every witness for a documentary to be shown across the world after the verdict. This will, of course, earn them far more than the £1m they say Charles almost cheated out of them. Sometimes I think that whoever masterminded this harebrained plot should be given a cut of Celador's documentary profits. I wonder who the criminal genius was. I don't think it was Charles.

The only major players who've not been signed up by Celador are the defendants. Three thousand journalists have approached the Ingrams for interviews. Although I am way ahead, being a family friend, I note that many other reporters have their own ingratiating tactics, and I'm not resting on my laurels. On Day One, for example, Charles entered court and gave his solicitors a kind of victory salute: a punch in the air. Half-a-dozen journalists, myself included, thought he was punching the air at us, so we performed slightly awkward victory salutes back. It was a little embarrassing.

A few feet down the corridor, the reporters gather in a circle, comparing notes.

"I liked it when Charles said the charges were 'absolute rot', " says one journalist.

"Do you think we can get away with having him say 'Tommy rot'?" says another. Everyone laughs.

It is agreed that Hilliard is a brilliantly scathing cross-examiner. A passing barrister - on his way to Court 5 - tells me that Hilliard "trounced me in a murder trial once". I didn't think to ask him whether the convicted murderer did it or not.

Tecwen Whittock sits far down the corridor, sometimes alone, sometimes with his son, Rhys. He's so unassuming that I never once see him enter the dock. He just seems to materialise. I wander over to him.

"I'm from Cardiff, too," I say.

"That's a coincidence," he says.

"And my mother went to Howell's," I say.

Howell's is the private school Tecwen sent his daughter to, running up a £20,000 bill. This debt, say the prosecutors, was Tecwen's motive.

"See?" says Tecwen. "That's another coincidence. Coincidences do happen!"

"I was at prep school with Adrian and Marcus Pollock," I say.

"That's another coincidence!" says Tecwen. "I'd like to see what Hilliard would do to you, with all those coincidences, if he got you on the stand."

I don't tell Tecwen the fourth coincidence - that Judge Rivlin is a distant cousin of my mother's.

I wander down the corridor to talk to the arresting officers. "Is this trial really worth it?" I ask detective sergeant Ian Williamson. "I mean, come on, in the end, what exactly did they do? Why didn't Celador just settle their differences with the Ingrams in a civil court?"

This is the worst question you can ask an arresting officer. They hate ambiguities. The police have a lot to lose if this trial goes badly for them. Some of the arresting officers were Paul Burrell's arresting officers. They really need a success after that fiasco.

"This trial," Williamson replies, crisply, "is about protecting the integrity of the Millionaire format. Millionaire is the most popular quiz show in the history of television. Celador has sold it to 100 countries. Thousands of jobs depend on its success..."

This is true. In fact, a BBC reporter down the corridor has just returned from Jordan, where she was meeting with Palestinian leaders. They asked her why she was going back to Britain. "It's to do with a quiz show called Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?" she said. The Palestinian leaders got really excited and said, "The coughing major! You're going to that trial?"

So I understand what Williamson means, but another thought occurs to me. The prize money Charles allegedly tried to cheat out of Celador came from the revenue generated from the premium rate phone lines - the calls the viewers make in their frequently fruitless attempts to get on to the show. So it is revenue generated from the far-fetched hopes and dreams of the viewing public, which seems like a cheat in itself. And how much is this trial costing? The answer is around £1m. If there's a guilty verdict, we the viewing public stand to lose £1m. If there's a not-guilty verdict, and Celador are forced to give Charles his cheque back, we will lose £2m.

"Watching that cross-examination has taught me one thing," I say to DS Williamson. "If I'm ever in a situation like that, I'm going to plead guilty." There is a small silence. "Proper criminals do," he replies.

Every morning sees a scrum for the public gallery seats. I secure my place each day because, like a weirdo, I arrive an hour early and I don't budge, even though I often very much need the toilet. Charles's father, himself an army man, sits next to me. He wears a tie pin shaped like a steam train. Unyielding pensioners with flasks of coffee mercilessly nab most of the other seats. One regular keeps passing me notes. I tend to open them with great anticipation. It is exciting to be handed a note in a courtroom. Today's note reads: "Is your suit made out of corduroy?"

The pensioners spend much of the day noisily unwrapping packets of Lockets and readjusting their screeching hearing aids. A young man behind me cracks his knuckles from 10am to 4pm. Each time the barristers mention the word "cough" - and the word "cough" is mentioned very frequently - many people sitting around me involuntarily cough. We are like a comedy club audience, determined to enjoy ourselves even if the comedian isn't very funny. Even Chris Tarrant's reading of the oath gets a loud chuckle from a man behind me.

Chris Tarrant may not be the world's greatest superstar, but within the context of this grubby building we've come to call home, the wallpaper peeling, the soap in the toilets as hard as a rock, the evidence dragging on and on, he is like a vision of paradise entering Court 4. Everyone is smitten.

"Has anyone ever got the first question wrong?" asks one defence barrister.

"It's happened in America," replies Tarrant, to huge laughter around the court. Tarrant looks surprised. He was just giving a factual response. During all the merriment, the fact that Tarrant heard no coughing, suspected no foul play, and even said to the show's producers, "Don't be stupid" when he was told of their suspicions, seems to have got lost.

Rod Taylor, Celador's head of marketing, gets a big laugh, too, during his evidence about how he frisked Charles shortly after he'd "won" the million. Taylor offers to frisk one of the barristers to show him how he did it. That gets a laugh. In the dock, Charles begins to cry.

"Why then?" I ask him at Starbucks the next day. "Why did you cry at that moment?"

I often meet Charles and Diana at Starbucks. I discovered early on that if I happen to be there at 9:05am, this is exactly when Charles queues up. We make small talk. Five minutes a day. That adds up, in my reckoning, to a substantial exclusive interview. "It was when Mr Aubrey [Tecwen Whittock's barrister] was cross-examining Rod Taylor and he said something and everyone laughed," replies Charles.

"What did he say?" I ask.

"He made a joke," says Charles. "Here I am, this cataclysmic event, my family on the line, and everyone is laughing. And you know how I feel about not wanting to look stupid."

"What was the joke?" I ask. "What was the exact thing he said that made you cry?" Charles pauses. Then he says, "It was when Mr Aubrey said to Rod Taylor, 'Did you search his privates?' "

This story begins in 2000. Tecwen Whittock was watching Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? one night when he recognised a contestant, but couldn't remember where from. I could have told him. It was my old school pal, Diana's brother, Adrian Pollock.

That's the same guy, Tecwen realised, who was on a few weeks ago. He's been on four times now! I think I'll track him down and ask him what his secret is.

Tecwen is a quiz-show veteran. He keeps a journal of trivia, of random facts and figures accrued over the years. He's been on 15 To 1, although he was eliminated in the first round. He didn't fare much better on The People Versus. He managed to Beat The Bong, whatever that means, but still only won £500. Sale Of The Century was another disaster. "I convinced my wife I'd win a car, but in fact I won the booby prize of a world atlas," he later tells the court. He had, however, once made it to the semi-final of Brain Of Britain.

Tecwen hoped to buy a silk bed for his dog, Bouncer, and a Robin Reliant for his son, Rhys, who was a member of the Only Fools And Horses fan club and wanted to drive the same car as the Trotters. Plus, he had credit card debts from his children's private education. He wondered if Adrian Pollock might give him tips on becoming a contestant, so he tracked him down to St Hilary, a village near Cardiff, and staked out his home.

"He seemed normal," Tecwen later told the police. "A couple of kids. A dog." When he later read that he and Marcus were supposedly involved in some internet scam, he thought, "Uh oh. Suspicious." Tecwen introduced himself to Adrian, who was flattered by his curiosity. They went to the pub, where Adrian took on the role of Tecwen's mentor, imparting his secrets. First, Adrian told Tecwen, keep calling Celador's premium rate phone line. Adrian had himself phoned 1,700 times. Second, when the random selector asks you a trivia question, try and answer it in a computer voice. Adrian had come to believe that Celador had programmed the selector to weed out certain regional accents.

He took his mentoring of Tecwen very seriously. He and Marcus visited Tecwen's home. They spoke on the phone 27 times. Adrian even asked Diana to become Tecwen's co-mentor.

"What did you talk to him about?" asks Hilliard, when he cross-examines Diana about her relationship with Tecwen.

"The Closest-To question," replies Diana.

The "Closest-To" is the question the Millionaire researchers ask you over the phone if you've been randomly selected and are now down to the last 100 possible contestants. It is always a numerical question: "How many radio stations are there in North America?" for example.

"They can be quite hard," explains Diana. "They've always got a numerical answer that could be anything, really."

"And that's the kind of insight you were offering Tecwen Whittock, was it?" asks Hilliard. "That they're quite hard and could be anything really?"

In fact, shortly before the arrests, Adrian and Diana delivered a manuscript of a book to John Brown Publishing, offering tips on how to get on to Millionaire. Both Diana and Adrian had won £32,000 in the hot seat. John Brown was ready to publish, but the arrests changed all that.

Meanwhile, over in Devizes, Wiltshire, Adrian had loaned his brother-in-law, Charles, his pretend mock-up Fastest Finger First console. Charles practised being fast-fingered on it. He phoned and phoned the random selector. He didn't, however, imitate a staccato computer voice. He thought Adrian's conspiracy theory about that was far-fetched. In fact, he later tells the court, he really doesn't like Adrian and Marcus.

"I don't like Diana getting involved in whatever it is they do," he says, adding that Adrian and Marcus have a history of getting involved in harebrained get-rich-quick schemes.

Back in Cardiff, Tecwen repeatedly called the Millionaire random selector in a staccato voice. "Before I knew it," he tells the court, "It worked. I was on."

Tecwen was booked to appear on September 10, 2001. Charles got on, too - on September 9. Even though the prosecution says that some other plot was probably in operation that evening, involving buzzing pagers strapped to Charles's body, or perhaps to Marcus's body, sitting in the audience, Charles didn't do well. He made it to £4,000 but lost two of his lifelines before the recording ended. Still, he survived to carry on the following night. Chris Tarrant announced the names of the Fastest Finger contestants who'd be joining Charles in the studio. Second on the list was Tecwen Whittock.

Charles told the police that the first he'd heard of Tecwen Whittock was two weeks later, on September 25, when the Sun named him as the mysterious cougher. He says the first time he met him was just a few weeks ago, right here at Southwark crown court. Certainly, in the dock, they studiously behave as if they are strangers. However, Diana's mobile telephone bill shows that at 11:02pm on the night of September 9 - as the Ingrams were driving home from the studio down the M4 - she phoned Tecwen for just over five minutes. Diana says the call was simply to congratulate her fellow Millionaire devotee on getting on to the show, and that Charles was asleep at the time. The prosecution says the call was for the three of them to put the coughing plot into action, a plot that must have been vaguely hatched during the "mentoring" conversations of the previous weeks.

When DS Williamson told me a few days ago that "proper criminals" plead guilty, I asked him what made the Ingrams and Tecwen not proper criminals. He said, "They may have engaged in a criminal act, but they don't have criminal minds. They made too many stupid mistakes."

One stupid mistake, he said, was that they called each other on their own phones. Another was that, at the Millionaire studio on September 10, neither Charles nor Diana said a word to Tecwen. How suspicious for Diana "the mentor" not to say hello to her student, especially when they'd been on the phone with each other just hours earlier. Diana says she didn't talk to Tecwen because she didn't know what he looked like. The most stupid mistake of all - say the police - was that they made it so bloody obvious.

The audience gave Charles a standing ovation after he correctly answered the £1m question. Diana ran down the studio's stairs to hug her husband. Her radio microphone picked up her saying, "How the hell did you do it? You must be mad!" As they walked to their dressing room, another Fastest Finger contestant congratulated them and said, "How did you get the Holbein question?" Diana turned to Charles, "Oh, that was one you knew, wasn't it, darling?"

Chris Tarrant: "The Ambassadors in the National Gallery is a painting by which artist: Van Eyck? Holbein? Michelangelo? Rembrandt?"

Charles: "I think it was either Holbein or Rembrandt. I've seen it. I think it was Holbein."

"Cough."

Charles: "I'm sure it was Holbein."

"Cough."

Charles: "I'm sure it was Holbein. I'm sure of it. I think I'm going to go for it."

"Cough."

Charles: "Yeah, Holbein."

Chris Tarrant: "You're fantastic, just fantastic."

It is Week Three of the trial, and the Ingrams' case has been effortlessly torn apart by Nicholas Hilliard.

"It's not nice to watch, is it?" says one arresting officer to me out in the corridor. I'm starting to think it may be driving Charles towards some sort of breakdown. He's already told the court about his year on medication since the arrest, how passers-by yell "Cheat!" when he's in his garden having a picnic, and how someone recently tried to shoot his cat, though this may have been unconnected. Personally, I think being cross-examined by Hilliard is punishment enough for a bit of cheeky deception on Millionaire.

My relationship with Charles is becoming awkward. My upbeat smiles have involuntarily turned into pitying grimaces. Charles seems compelled to behave in a fake-laddish manner in front of me.

"Oh," he laughs throatily in the corridor in a break after performing particularly badly on cross-examination. "I knew I shouldn't have gone out on the piss last night!"

I play along. "Did you?" I ask.

"Well," he adds, theatrically massaging his forehead, "it was a supper party, but it was much the same thing!"

"Charles!" calls Diana from down the corridor. "Come here!"

"Sorry, sorry," he calls back.

Diana has gone off me. Yesterday I was staring into space for a long time near Starbucks, thinking about other things, when I realised that I was staring straight at Diana, who was looking back at me, horrified, as if I was an obsessed stalker glaring at her from afar.

Today an incongruously suave stranger sits next to me in the public gallery. He is Robert Brydges, and he was in the Millionaire audience on September 10.

"I kept looking round for where Charles was getting help from," Robert says. "I knew the process was bogus - he was just so erratic - but I didn't hear the coughs."

Robert thinks Charles should have stuck on £500,000. Celador might have been suspicious, but it would have probably honoured the cheque. Even though Robert himself was suspicious, he was also inspired by Charles's success. Over the next two days, while Britain reeled from the World Trade Centre attacks, Robert repeatedly called the Millionaire random selector. "I worked out," he says, "that if you call 350 times you have a 50/50 chance of getting on to a particular show." He phoned more than 1,000 times. "I read that Charles had been practising the Fastest Finger First on a mock-up console, so I built one, too, on my laptop." Robert's plan worked. On September 25, he found himself in the same place Charles had been a fortnight earlier - in the Millionaire hot seat.

The next day's Sun headline read: "MILLIONAIRE WORTH FEW BOB MORE. Super-rich Robert Brydges beamed with joy last night as he returned home after winning a million on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? Banker Robert could not contain his excitement, even though he was a millionaire twice over BEFORE appearing on the quiz show. He declared with a grin: 'Believe me I'm happy. I'm very happy.' "

Robert is writing a book called The Third Millionaire about his and Charles's parallel lives. What is it about the human condition that one good man can win £1m legitimately, when another has to resort to fraud? In the corridor, Robert introduces himself to Charles and mentions the name of his book.

"If you don't mind, I like to think of you as the fourth millionaire," says Charles.

"Can we agree on 3A and 3B?" says Robert.

"Charles!" calls Diana, from down the corridor.

"OK, sorry!" Charles calls back, and scuttles off.

"I don't care how many Mensa badges he's wearing," mutters Robert. "On the £8,000 question he could hardly remember that Emmenthal cheese was from Switzerland." I laugh. "Does all this remind you of Macbeth?" says Robert. "The bluff soldier, with the pale, mysterious woman behind him?"

We regulars spend much of our time psychoanalysing the Ingrams. This is because their demeanours are so un-criminal. Even the police, unusually, get involved in the speculation. "The major is a strange character," says one arresting officer during a press briefing. "Puzzling. I can't figure him out. There have been some comments in court about Diana being stronger..." He pauses. "I don't understand that sort of relationship. I'm not part of a relationship like that."

"You're a lucky man!" shouts a journalist.

Are the Millionaire three innocent?

This article is more than 13 years old

Jon Ronson

I was sure the three 'quizzers' convicted of defrauding Chris Tarrant's show were guilty. But now I have my doubts.

Mon 17 Jul 2006 10.54 BST

Comments

Iam beginning to suspect that Charles Ingram, his wife, Diana, and Tecwen Whittock - the three quiz show enthusiasts convicted of attempting to defraud Who Wants to be Millionaire? out of £1m using an elaborate system of audience-based coughs - may be innocent.

I'm amazed to find myself thinking this. I sat through every day of the trial, and wrote an article about it. At the time, like everyone else, I thought the plot was hilariously obvious and badly executed. The plan was clearly for Charles to chew over the answers out loud and for Tecwen - sitting behind him in a Fastest Finger First seat - to cough after the correct one. For example:

Chris Tarrant: Baron Haussmann is best known for his planning of which city? Rome, Paris, Berlin, Athens.

Charles Ingram: I think it's Berlin. Haussmann is a more German name than Italian or Parisian or Athens. I'd be saying Berlin if I was at home watching this on TV.

Cough: NO!

The first time this "NO!" was played in court, every journalist and member of the public burst out laughing. Judge Rivlin threatened to clear the court.

Charles: I don't think it's Paris.

Cough.

Charles: I don't think it's Athens.

No cough.

Charles: I'm sure it's not Rome.

No cough.

Charles: I would have thought it's Berlin, but there's a chance it's Paris. Think, think! I think it's Berlin. It could be Paris. I think it's Paris.

Cough.

Charles. I am going to play ...

I had always intended to contact Charles after a few years to ask him whether he would be willing to tell me how the plot had been hatched. Give it a few years and he was bound to talk, I thought. There were many unanswered questions. Who was the mastermind? How exactly was it put into operation? Those things remained unclear from the trial. So I emailed him last Thursday night. He emailed me back the next morning: "Jon, what a bizarre email from someone who professed publicly that you followed the case so closely from the inside! We are in desperate straits ..."

He went on to relate the nightmare his life had become: bankruptcy, terrible prejudice etc. He sounded at the end of his tether. He continued: "As for your question about ... 'ANY truth in the prosecution's case?' the very question is utterly ridiculous and unjust. No cheating took place, yet it is true my name is Charles Ingram ... that does not make me guilty of cheating ...We are of the opinion you are not interested in the truth, only in profiteering. The truth hurts, doesn't it? Charles Ingram."

For a second, the weird ferocity of his denial - all these years later - made me think that perhaps he was innocent after all. But I quickly put the thought out of my mind. Instead, I thought, how crazy to still be denying the obvious.

Charles had copied his email to a few other people. Later that morning, one of them, James Plaskett, emailed me. Plaskett himself recently won £250,000 on Millionaire. He is part of a network of people who call themselves quizzers: quiz show enthusiasts, practically professional contestants. They have forums dedicated to swapping tips on how to get on to shows. Tecwen Whittock and the Ingrams were also quizzers.

Plaskett wrote to me: "I am near 100% certain of the innocence of the Millionaire three."

He sent me a link to an essay he has written, in which he attempts to prove their innocence.

I began reading it thinking it might be a fun insight into the interesting, slightly shadowy, eccentric world of the quizzer. But within a few minutes I was utterly bowled over by how brilliantly he had cast doubt on every single piece of prosecution evidence.

There have always been troubling aspects to this case, the most troubling being Tecwen Whittock's persistent cough, a medical fact that went undisputed by the prosecution. This is what I wrote at the time:

Tecwen has his entire life suffered from a persistent cough. Water helps. He carries some everywhere, and fruit juice, and inhalers, and cough medicine. It's a ticklish cough, like a frog in his throat, very phlegmy. A stream of doctors and friends take the stand, attesting to Tecwen's irritating cough.

[Defence barrister David] Aubrey sums up by saying: "So, when was this plan supposedly hatched? During a late-night telephone call, on September 9, lasting less than five minutes. Is it really likely that Mr Whittock would take part in such a hastily conceived scheme? Wouldn't he have said, 'You can't count on me. I'm liable to cough at any time!'"

Many in court, journalists as well as witnesses, felt perplexed by this, but we put it to one side because we had already convinced ourselves of their guilt. We were very much enjoying the narrative of their guilt. And the thing that made them seem most guilty was the famous recording - the one in which Charles repeatedly chewed over the four possible answers and Tecwen - on every occasion - coughed after the correct one.

A strange irony, throughout the trial, was that every time someone on the witness stand mentioned the word cough - and the word cough was mentioned very often - pensioners in the public gallery began involuntarily coughing. I mentioned that in my piece at the time.

Yesterday, James Plaskett emailed me to say: "In my opinion, your observation that large numbers of ailing people burst out coughing every time a barrister in court said 'cough' is THE KEY point. Although, perhaps, even you yourself did not appreciate that!"

Here is Plaskett's alternative theory as to why Tecwen coughed every time Charles said the correct answer out loud:

In November 2001 Celador produced a DVD about their show: Magic Moments and More. It includes the complete performance of Judith Keppel as she became the first person to win the million. Audible (although unamplified) audience coughs just after her first enunciating the correct answer, but before her definitely committing by saying "final answer", are clearly discernible at the £2,000, £4,000, £64,000, £500,000 and £1,000,000 points, and one more is faintly discernible at the £8,000 point. That is, six of the last 10 questions, just as with Ingram.

These are illustrations of responsive coughing. People are known to cough on unconscious triggers. People with coughs and throat irritations may experience the need to cough as the correct answer to a question - one which they knew - were read out.Nerves could account for it. Or perhaps Whittock (and/or those close to him) did not know with certainty the answers to some questions, but had eliminated the least likely options until a mental decision had been made, and then involuntarily coughed as those were recited. Then it was not chance. Neither was it cheating. One family member was not trying to help out another. Responsive coughing; that was all.

br>That such similar patterns of coughing - especially the Keppel series - may be demonstrated seems to me to be THE STRONGEST POSSIBLE EVIDENCE for the defence. And the court did not hear of it.

Plaskett's theory as to why Tecwen audibly growled "NO!" after Charles said "Berlin" in the Haussmann question was that lots of people in the Millionaire audience whisper "no!" to each other. Plaskett has been in the audience three times, so he is something of an expert on this.

As I read Plaskett's essay, I kept thinking: yes, yes, but what about THAT piece of prosecution evidence? Then he would get to it and cast doubt on it. And I can tell you - having sat through every day of the trial - he has not left out a single piece of prosecution evidence.

I can spot only one possible error in Plaskett's otherwise exhaustive, excellent account. He writes:

It was a majority verdict of 10-1. One juror was overheard outside the court saying that he thought the three accused to be innocent, and therefore the judge dismissed him.

It is true that a juror was dismissed after being overheard pontificating about the case in a pub, but I don't believe he was pontificating about their innocence.

I emailed Charles Ingram yesterday. I said that after reading Plaskett's essay I was beginning to believe they may be innocent. I suggested we met. Maybe I could investigate further? He sent me a very short, terse reply: "That's very kind, but no thanks."

Why would he write that? Is he guilty, and was afraid that if I started digging I would find further evidence of his guilt? Or is he an innocent, stubborn fool, refusing to see a possible opportunity to clear his name because he has been driven half crazy by bankruptcy and by being one of the most laughed-at men in Britain?

Playing the Gameby James Plaskett (updated: Sat, Dec 3, 2005)

In April 2003, Charles Ingram, Diana Ingram and Tecwen Whittock were given fines and suspended sentences at Southwark Crown Court when found guilty of attempting to cheat Celador out of the £1,000,000 top prize on their Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? TV quiz show. Ingram had behaved unusually as a player, not least in that he had the habit of saying out loud the 4 possible answers to each question. The tapes seem to show that on 19 occasions, Whittock coughed just after Ingram had mentioned a correct optional answer to a question, and never after he mentioned an incorrect one. When it subsequently emerged that Mrs Ingram, who was also there that night, had been in regular telephone contact with Whittock before the show, then, to many people, the case against the three looked clear cut.

I´m not so sure.

Contestant Larry Whitehurst sat opposite in the studio from Whittock. He tipped off Scotland Yard that at the £500,000 point he spotted the pattern of coughing just after the mentioning of the right answer. At the £1,000,000 question: "I was absolutely certain there was going to be a signal... He seemed to dismiss Googol initially and he went all round the houses as he had done through the show, and as soon as he got to Googol, Whittock went 'cough, cough'."

Mr Whitehurst is a strong quizzer who probably knew the answers to many of the questions. His certainty on the coughing, as expressed to the court, differs from his police statement of September 2001, which concludes: "I would like to say that it is possible that what I saw was just an amazing set of coincidences and that the possibility remains that I witnessed no criminal behaviour."

By the way, in an indignant response of December 18th 2003, Mr Whitehurst wrote "I did know quite a few of the answers. I expect others did too, they weren’t that difficult." Shame he did not tell the jury that when he testified of the one guy who, unlike him, VERBALLY provided the answers, and received £1,000,000 for so doing: "He just nicked a million".

Ingram insisted that neither he nor the host noticed any coughing. But, with respect, that is not the point. Someone on the other side of the studio did, so it must have been potentially audible to those in the middle. Expert witness, Professor Alan Morris (whose evidence was interrupted by a juror's persistent coughing) testified that Whittock suffered from a year-round dust allergy as well as hay fever. "He also tested very positive for cough variant asthma, which would have been made progressively worse by a hot TV studio. He had a very convincing story to me of someone who provides a cogent history of what an allergic type person complains of."

Whittock claimed his hay fever caused him to cough every day, mostly in the mornings and evenings. This helps to explain why contestant Steve Carroll noted that Whittock´s coughing worsened throughout Ingram´s performance, although he had not coughed at rehearsal. During rehearsal the studio would have been not nearly so hot and also it was not a morning nor an evening time.

This testimony also refutes Martin Bashir´s commentary on Celador´s Major Fraud documentary: "As the two men become more confident in their system the coughs become more frequent." In fact, that he coughed more and more as the programme progressed is absolutely consistent with his medical conditions.

So severe is Whittock´s cough problem that he habitually carries a bottle of water with him. But he had none that night. The prosecution observed that he had managed not to cough during appearances on other quiz shows, including Fifteen To One, The People Versus and Brain Of Britain. But on those the studio time would have been much briefer than the hours of recording on WWTBAM?.

In 1989 my wife was a guest on a TV show called The Time, The Place. She has some respiratory problems, which had been worsened by exposure to smoke a day or two earlier, and asked to take water with her into the studio. Staff refused, saying that if it spilt and someone slipped they would have insurance problems. So she smuggled some in.

Whittock said that he cannot remember just when he coughed. But, although his conditions account for his chronic coughing, they do not explain the coughs coming 19 times just after Ingram enunciates a correct option.

These explanations neither man supplied. We may note that he tended to mention the correct options far more frequently than the incorrect ones, thus increasing the likelihood of a cough following a correct option being heard. But, even after conceding such points, the collective improbability of those 19 coughs coming when they did seemed so colossal that the jury had to let themselves be decisively influenced by it. And that was why the three defendants were convicted.

But it was a majority verdict of 10-1. One juror was overheard outside the court saying that he thought the three accused to be innocent, and therefore the Judge dismissed him. If this juror had not been barred maybe his opinion would have resulted in others having doubt. A split of 9-3 is not acceptable, and would have resulted in the case being thrown out or going to retrial.

1) A POSSIBLE INNOCENT EXPLANATION FOR THE TIMING OF THE COUGHS

But the court did not hear a possible innocent explanation for the timing of Whittock´s 19 "particular" coughs; responsive coughing.

The trial itself provided an example of something along these lines. It took place in London in March. Jon Ronson sat in the public gallery for the 22 days. He reported in the Guardian of April 19th 2003: "Charles's father sits next to me... pensioners... nab most of the other seats... The pensioners spend much of the day noisily unwrapping packets of Lockets... Each time the barristers mention the word "cough" many people sitting around me involuntarily cough."

Each time. Hundreds of triggers and responses. Not just 19. And neither any occasion he noted when the word "cough" from a barrister did not meet with widespread coughing from the zone where the people with throat problems were gathered. What sort of astronomical numbers do you need to explain that as chance? Googol levels of unlikelihood. But all of those people were quite unaware of what was sometimes causing them to cough, and had they been shown the statistics, they would have been startled by them.

There were, naturally, many other occasions when they coughed without any triggers, just as there were 17 recorded Whittock coughs which did not coincide with Ingram considering any option. And we also do not know what coughs he may have produced in the 2 commercial breaks that night, as Celador did not produce any recordings made during those.

In November 2001 Celador produced a DVD about their show: Magic Moments and More. It includes the complete performance of Judith Keppel as she became the first person to win the million. Audible (although unamplified) audience coughs just after her first enunciating the correct answer, but before her definitely committing by saying "Final answer", are clearly discernible at the £2,000, £4,000, £64,000, £500,000 and £1,000,000 points, and one more is faintly discernible at the £8,000 point. That is six of the last ten questions, just as with Ingram
These are illustrations of responsive coughing. People are known to cough on unconscious triggers. People with coughs and throat irritations may experience the need to cough as the correct answer to a question - one which they knew - were read out.

Nerves could account for it. Or perhaps Whittock (and/or those close to him) did not know with certainty the answers to some questions, but had eliminated the least likely options until a mental decision had been made, and then involuntarily coughed as those were recited. Then it was not chance. Neither was it cheating. One family member was not trying to help out another. Responsive coughing; that was all.

That such similar patterns of coughing - especially the Keppel series - may be demonstrated seems to me to be THE STRONGEST POSSIBLE EVIDENCE for the defence. And the court did not hear of it.

If you are prepared to run with the idea that the 19 "particular coughs" of Whittock´s recorded 36 were no more than such involuntary nervous responses, triggered by the mentioning of an answer which he either definitely knew or had reasoned to be the most plausible, then you may agree with my judgement; that responsive coughing sits better with the facts, because there are just too many points which do not fit with the alternative of signalling.

And, before examining the other salient evidence, do not forget that it is not demonstrated that all of the "particular coughs" were definitely Whittock´s. At rehearsal that afternoon, contestant number one, Steve Carroll, who sat a metre from Whittock throughout the recording, coughed so much that the show´s host expressed concern, and contestant´s four and five have both said that they too coughed. Contestant two was not asked by the Police.

2) WHAT TRUE VALUE WOULD THE HELP HAVE BEEN?

What then is the other evidence for Ingram having been helped? And when assessing the potential value of such assistance, remember that although many times couples have consulted openly on special UK editions of WWTBAM?, never has any got further than the £250,000 mark. Although Whittock was certainly a very strong quizzer, Ingram pertinently observed of the cough that is claimed to have prompted his answer to the £1,000,000 question: "If somebody shouted out the bloody answer I wouldn´t agree with them! There is no way you would gamble that much money on coughing. Would you?" He had no definite way of knowing.

Sean O´Neill reported in The Daily Telegraph of April 8th 2003: - "Officers from the special inquiry team carried out ´a complex and unusual´ 18-month inquiry. But sources concede they do not know the full truth behind the case. One said: ´I've never thought that we've been able to find every piece of the jigsaw.´"

The full truth could be there is no jigsaw.

3) A REAL COUGHER IN PLACE TO DO THE FAKING

There are rumours on the internet that there have been plans, on other occasions, for an accomplice sitting in FFF seats 6 to 10, from where he would be visible to the player, to signal through hand movements. I suppose we are to assume that they would have had some such code of visual signals prepared, had the luck of the draw placed Whittock in front of the player. Unfortunately, as the prosecution would have it, they would have discovered at the studio that he was placed in a seat behind him, so auditory signalling became the only option.

What a stroke of luck, don´t you think, to have less than 24 hours notice to notify one particular man - the only one you could recruit - that you wanted him to be in position to serve as a fake chronic cougher, when it turns out that he actually had THREE diagnosed reasons to exhibit a chronic cough under the conditions in that studio?

Much better than a healthy guy. I mean, like this, it looks like he could have had a genuine reason, or three, to be at it. I find that remarkable. Most of us, were we to accept the job, would have to fake not only the timing of the coughs, but also a cough problem.

They deliberated in the jury room for over 14 hours, plus a weekend at home, before returning a majority verdict. What whisker of a chance do you think any defence would have stood, after the coughs had been spotted, had Whittock had no known reason to be coughing that night? But a bogus cougher would have one advantage over that sick man who now has a criminal record: he would be able to place coughs with absolute PRECISION. That´s the sort of guy you want to be signalling to you, isn´t it?

The improbability of getting just this man in to do the required job the next day I find extremely salient in the assessment of whether or not the coughs we hear were genuine.

4) ABSENCE OF SIMPLE CODING

It was claimed on the documentary that Major Ingram´s habit of reciting the 4 alternative answers attracted suspicion from very early on on the night of September 10th 2001. Martin Bashir observed that the cheats´ plan was for Whittock "... to cough after Ingram reads out the right answers." But there was no need for him to recite them; the host does that for you as the question appears, and he will go through them again at least once after that.

Despite Chris Tarrant´s reference to him as "nice, but dim", Ingram is actually a member of the high IQ society, Mensa. However, Charles´ wife and father have said, as did he, that he habitually repeats things over and over. My father-in-law was a Major in the British Army, and my wife said how Ingram´s slightly bumbling manner, his repeating himself and his attention to details were reminiscent of her father´s. Some people had mistakenly thought him thick, too.

But if you do want to list them yourself, then why not have that submitting of the options, at least partly, coded? Imagine a repertoire of signals - you would only need four - where, if the player takes a sip of water, he is indicating´A´. Or if Ingram scratches an ear, he indicates ´B´. He exchanged many words with the amiable UK host, as players often do. If he uses one of three prearranged ones, he means ´C´. His glance at the ceiling means ´D´.

They might deploy some different signals for each question. Occasional verbal mentioning of answers by the player might fit in with this, to make the whole thing seem more realistic. And if you have to use this auditory method of signalling, surely it would be better if the cough came at other answers than the correct one (e.g., if the correct answer is ´A´, cough on ´B´) ? That would be a code. Or they could even alter it for each question, where a cough at ´B´, at the £64,000 stage meant ´A´, but ´A´ were to be indicated at the £125,000 stage by moving the cough on one place more, i.e. at ´C´, and so on. Or they could arrange for it to come, say, 5-8 seconds after either Ingram´s saying of the correct option, Tarrant´s saying of it or the disguised signalling of it by the player.

The media reports contain passim references to "coded coughing". But the Crown´s case is that there was no attempt to disguise the meaning of the transmission, and that they merely hoped that a normally innocent act would not be interpreted for what it now was: signalling. The medium itself was to be Tecwen´s message. Whittock pointed out to the court that using uncoded coughs carried a strong probability of getting caught. "It would have been a very silly thing to do."

Such a genuine coding, of both options and affirmations, could be childishly simple and crystal clear, but only to those who possessed the cypher. People would have a much harder time, if not a well-nigh impossible one, in convincing themselves that they had spotted that scam - especially if it were done quickly and if they, even to some extent, varied the signals. And if it were detected, it would be much harder for any action to be taken, for the plotters could front it out and challenge their accusers to prove anything.

We are asked to accept that a senior college lecturer, a Mensa member with two degrees and an obviously intelligent woman hit upon a signalling scam the naivete of which would have put three small children to shame. I can´t see it. Since the prosecution argued that the Ingrams were prepared to experiment with concealed pagers, disguising and varying a coughing signal hardly sounds too high tech a scheme to me. Had an analysis of the tapes strongly indicated cyphered coughing, then I would be far less sympathetic to the Defence case.

Indeed, so vulnerable is the format of this show that, given that it has aired in over 100 countries, I would expect that such a fraud involving coded signals has probably been used somewhere. But nobody spotted it. I find the Crown´s depiction of this fraud TOO simple, and there seem just too many salient parts of the story which do not mesh with signalling. I must therefore regard the only alternative explanation for this distribution of coughs - the explanation which the court did not hear - as the more plausible; responsive coughing.

People do cough. The Judge´s summation had to be adjourned because of uncontrollable coughing from several jurors. During his sentencing there was a great deal of coughing from the public gallery. Celador staff have spoken of their increasing anxiety that something was amiss as Ingram progressed. If Whittock´s coughing gave cause for suspicion, then why did they not briefly halt recording and ask him to step out of the studio? They could have claimed problems for the sound engineers and/or that it might affect the player´s concentration. He could have been readmitted when the next FFF round took place. They might even have offered him medical assistance.

5) WATER STOPS THE COUGH

Eventually such a remedy was provided, after Ingram had won, in the form of glasses of water. Those stopped the cough. But when observing that Whittock´s cough had vanished when he took the contestant´s chair after Ingram, Mr Martin Bashir omitted to mention that this therapy had been administered. Or they might have told him the truth; that he could be sending signals to the player. The precaution of removing Whittock would then have safeguarded him, Ingram and themselves. Instead, they let the guy hack away and then took steps to saddle him with a criminal record.

6) TUITIONAL ADVICE, OR PLANNING A FRAUD?

It emerged that Ingram´s wife and Mr Whittock had been in communication before the show, something Ingram said he only learnt of a month after he was on. But Mrs Ingram´s brother had been on 4 times. Whittock noted that and that he lived not far away, so he sought him out. The brother then said that he and his sister had co-written a book on how to succeed on WWTBAM?. So who would have been a more natural person for Whittock to contact?

I, for instance, contacted someone who had been successful on the show: Peter Lee. And I wrote to him via Celador, who said that they would be happy to forward my letter. He replied with a long letter in which he spoke of his preparation for not only the show but also the call back question on the telephone, a phase he reached 3 times. Useful tips. But Mrs Lee probably does not know about my correspondence with her husband. I am confident that other instances exist of successful WWTBAM? players being approached by those who wish to get on. As a chess Grandmaster, I am frequently consulted by strangers for advice on how to improve all aspects of their game.

The Ingram family spotted that a tranche of calls made at the start of a series of WWTBAM? was likely to lead to a call back. This tactic got Diana on twice. Probably Whittock had used it to become a contestant once before that night´s show, and then the same ploy got him on again.

On September 9th, 2001, after Ingram had finished his first day as a player, a call was made at 23:02 from Diana Ingram's mobile to Whittock's daughter's phone, which he was using at the time. Diana had heard that night that Whittock would be a contestant on the next day´s show. On September 10th, at 09:25, a call was made from Whittock's daughter's phone to the Ingram´s home, and about three hours later, a call was returned from Mrs Ingram's mobile.

Whittock spent the night of September 9th in a London hotel. That the three would not make even the briefest rendezvous before undertaking the biggest risk of their lives, but rather supposedly secured the deal via two further very short phone conversations the next day, I find unlikely. A clandestine meeting, or at the very least considerably longer spent on the phone, seems much more sensible to me.

7) NOT SENSIBLE AND UNENFORCEABLE CONTRACT

And would Whittock have wanted to take part in this business, anyway? Tecwen was regarded as something of a quiz Grandmaster, so would it not have made more sense to have hoped for Charles (not known as a strong quizzer) to make an early exit so that he could have tried to obtain his own shot, with its promise of undivided spoils and no risk of any undesirable consequences?

Why risk all by helping the Major, a man whom he could hardly have known (in fact there is no evidence that they had ever been in communication) and who began the evening on £4,000 with two lifelines already spent? Of the three anticipated FFF heats, Whittock ought to have considered himself to have a good chance of qualifying from one (and indeed he did win the only such heat that night.)

In league with the Ingrams, he would probably have been on to a lot less than a third of the full million, as only two people had gone that far. But he could have had excellent hopes of quite a big win, entire and riskless, by leaving Charles to his own devices. Diana´s telephoned news that she had ´the keys to the vault´ might well have met with the reply: "Thanks. But I think I have a good shot at gaining legitimate access, and all for myself."

He saw her brother on 4 times, she twice, her husband on thrice and he himself was now back for a second go. The opportunity she supposedly dangled before him was not the chance of a lifetime. By now people were cottoning on that you can get back on to WWTBAM? A decent, family man is to lay his security and reputation on the line for a share of the dosh as part of a cabal who only hit upon the idea the night before during a five minute call as the lady drove home.

How would Whittock have been in a position afterwards to have enforced this contract? He would have been relying on the stranger, Ingram´s, sense of honour: Honour amongst thieves. It is certainly not impossible, I suppose, that Whittock would have agreed, during such minimal telephone negotiations, to participate in this highly dangerous con. But already, at the outset, I find the prosecution case implausible. Potentially, they had hours of available phone time in which to set it up and to arrange codes, yet the records show that they did not make use of them. Why ever not?

8) CELADOR LIE ABOUT DIANA INGRAM´s TWO COUGHS TO STRENGTHEN THEIR CASE

Mrs Ingram coughed when her husband announced the remaining 2 answers to Question 10, for £32,000. The Major Fraud documentary presented this as evidence of fraud. Standby contestant Robert Brydges has stated that he believes there is no way Ingram could have heard her coughs there. Brydges was in the public gallery on more than one day of the trial. Even though he did not testify, the Judge independently instructed the jury not to regard those coughs from Mrs Ingram as any kind of guidance to her husband.

Martin Bashir forgot that direction. His commentary also noted of her at this point "Unaware her every move is being recorded..." Throughout her husband´s entire stay in the hot seat, Mrs Ingram had a camera trained on her face by a man standing just in front of her. This precaution is always used since an incident early in the history of the show in Poland where the invited guest was caught signalling to the player. That´s why Celador put him there - to stop her signalling.

So I can only regard Bashir´s comment "Unaware her every move is being recorded..." as a deliberate lie, which would also apply to his next remark: "His wife seems to check the studio televisions. Diana Ingram´s not on screen but the cameras are still rolling". You do not forget a camera trained exclusively on your face from less than a metre away.

What actually happened, as Brydges and Ingram both said, was that he went for it and gave the wrong answer of the two remaining. That prompted a gasp from the audience and he consequently changed his mind. That is not cheating. But when Tarrant subsequently several times mentioned his amazement at the U-turn there, Ingram could hardly have publicly said what had caused it, could he?

Given the Judge´s direction that Mrs Ingram´s coughs there were insignificant, and also that no other coughs of hers were ever cited, we might ask; What evidence of any kind is there against her, then? Only some phone calls, of unspecified content, between her and Whittock, it would seem. Question 10 is critical. As success grants the player a guaranteed £32,000, plus a risk free shot at the £64,000 question, it is clearly correct to guess when you do not know the answer and have to chose between two alternatives. And perhaps even mathematically defensible to guess when you have to choose between three.

9) EARLY EXPENDITURE OF LIFELINES UNREMARKABLE

Celador staff have said how Ingram´s usage of two lifelines by the £4,000 mark at the end of his first day´s play, gave them cause to regard him as too weak a player to have much chance of going far. I appeared several times on this show and the first time, Tarrant himself encouraged early use of lifelines, instructing us that this did not preclude a big win. He said that a man had recently not known the answer to an early question on soccer. "The whole nation was screaming ARSENAL at the screen...!" But the chap was not sporty and so blew a lifeline. He did not use another until £64,000. I have also seen a man have only one lifeline left by the £2,000 mark, and still go on on to win £250,000.

Tarrant said that Ingram´s early expenditure of two lifelines made him think: "That poor bloody Major. He's got as much chance of getting to £32,000 as going to the moon in a rocket". Of course bad players will tend to use up lifelines early on. But, it is also a start not inconsistent with a big win. Consider this from page 11 of Tarrant´s book 'Millionaire Moments': - "The really bright contestants tend to find the questions easier as the money goes up. They are probably more likely to get stuck on an early question about a boy band, Coronation Street or Aston Villa than when asked later about the paintings of Michaelangelo, the poetry of Alexander Pope or the geography of outer Mongolia". Which perhaps explains why Ingram blew one lifeline on a question about boy bands and another on an early question about Coronation Street, doesn´t it? Do you think that the two previous winners of the million would have been able to answer those questions unaided?

What he told us in November 1999 was the opposite of what he said when presenting evidence against these three people and what he wrote in his book. The stance taken by Mr Tarrant, Sound Supervisor, Kevin Duff and presenter Bashir was unjustified. Using the lifelines early on emphatically does not necessarily mean that you are not good enough to get to the million unaided.

10) CELADOR LIE ABOUT INGRAM´S WAY OF ANSWERING TO STRENGTHEN THEIR CASE

On Major Fraud, Executive Producer, Rod Taylor had his suspicions for thinking Ingram a player not good enough to go far. But he gave a false version of "... the way he was attempting to answer the questions and the way he finally chose an answer. He would make some humourous comment about each answer, how it couldn´t be that because he didn´t know it or it wasn´t that as he was certain it wasn´t that and then finally plumping for an answer that he had disregarded 3 efforts ago or 3 mentions before... But he was doing that to all of them."

That is not true. It was actually only on the last two of his eight questions that night that Ingram initially seemed to prefer one answer before later giving another (except at Question 10, for £32,000 where, as he readily admitted, it was an audience gasp that told him that he had given the wrong answer of the two remaining, and so caused him to change his mind). On the others, i.e. at 8,000, 16,000, 64,000, 125,000 and £250,000, he gave as his final answer the one he had first suggested. Indeed he proposed what he thought was probably the correct answer to each of the first 3 of those 5 questions within 16 seconds of the host´s listing of the options and before any cough was heard.

At 125,000 and 250,000 it is less clear how long he took to give his first answer, as some editing may have occurred. But there too he gave as his first idea the correct answer, and before any cough from Whittock.

11) 1023-1 AGAINST HIS FIRST CITING THE CORRECT ANSWER TO THOSE FIVE QUESTIONS

The odds against guessing correctly are clearly 1 in 4 each time. So to do so 5 times is 1 in 4 to the power 5, or 1 in 1024. What this means is that, regardless of whether or not you think Ingram got any help later on whilst he was pondering the answers to those 5 questions, his ability to quickly cite the correct answer to each of them - thereby pulling off a feat, in a multiple choice setting, with odds of 1023 to 1 against - reveals him as almost certainly a very strong quizzer.

It ought also to affect our assessment of the repeated Celador assertions that they had grounds to consider him a weak player, and the comment of Mr Bashir at the point in the documentary where Ingram had completed his first day´s play: "He´ll clearly struggle on his own." Mr Taylor´s version of how Ingram was arriving at his answers was quite untrue, and he and Celador knew it to be untrue when he said it and when it was broadcast. Mr Taylor´s lies, together with Mr Bashir´s earlier lies and Mr Tarrant´s curiously selective memory, should be borne in mind when considering the defence of the standard of this documentary made by its editor, James Goldston: "The programme was not unfairly or selectively edited in any way. We are sure viewers will have made up their own minds."

Celador Managing Director, Paul Smith observed - "There were coughs coming from Tecwen Whittock and those were used to prompt the Major... you can see him reacting to them, you can see the pattern." I couldn´t see any kind of pattern, certainly not until he had reached £250,000. At question 8, for £8,000, Ingram quickly said he thought that Kennedy´s widow went on to marry "Onassis". Whittock coughed. Shortly after Ingram said he was sure it was Onassis and Whittock coughed again. Ingram gave Onassis as his final answer.

At questions 9 and 10, no coughing from Whittock. At question 11 Ingram quickly said that he thought the answer was "Cricket", and said that he had seen a picture depicting the annual Gentlemen Vs Players match in his grandfather´s study. At question 12 Ingram said he thought that The Ambassadors was painted by "Holbein or Rembrandt", and that he had seen it. He then later gave the correct answer of "Holbein."

At question 13, Ingram said that he thought that an Anthony Eden was a "Hat", and went on to describe one, and then finally give as his correct answer "Hat." Those who believe that coughs, "nos" and blowings of Whittock´s nose helped him to that conclusion might ponder on how any of those sounds could have helped Ingram to describe the hat. For he did so, accurately.

But it was Ingram´s unusual behaviour on the last two of his questions that suggested to many that he had to be up to something. Favouring one answer on big money questions only to then dramatically switch direction, without clear explanation why, was conduct with which they were certainly NOT familiar. I think, initially, my suspicions would have also been aroused. Yet under analysis, neither his behaviour, nor that of Whittock, seems to me to indicate cheating.

12) NO "NO!"

It is claimed that Whittock coughed and said "No!" as Ingram mentioned an incorrect answer to Question 14, for £500,000, and that this was an attempt to influence Ingram. The sound did not become a "No" until the courtroom, and even then it was described as a "partial whisper that sounded like a 'No'". Whittock denies saying "No". It was also agreed by experts in court that the "No" in question did not sound like it came from him.

But if it was him, then how daft a risk to take! Whittock sat in Fastest Finger seat 3. He would have had to have hoped that not only it would not be picked up by his adjacent contestants in seats 1, 2, 4 and 5, each, like himself, wearing a microphone which monitored and recorded all nearby noises, but also that it avoided detection by the bank of people seated just behind him (even those 3 rows back would be a lot nearer than the player) and not overshoot by a metre to reach the host, who, like Ingram, wore a microphone. The plotters would have been aware of these conditions since they had each been on before and so had the chance to ´case the joint´. Even were a trained ventriloquist to attempt that, I would still give the broad daylight heist of the Crown Jewels more chance of success. You simply cannot get away with it, undetected, under those conditions.

The Major Fraud documentary claimed that Ingram had at this point forgotten the code procedure. (In case you too have forgotten, that was for a cough to be supplied as he recited answer ´A´ were ´A´ correct, on ´B´ if ´B´ were correct, etc). So his accomplice had to cough and accompany it with a smothered "No!", otherwise, we were told, Ingram would have misinterpreted the cough for an affirmation that the answer for which he appeared to be plumping - Berlin - were the right one.

Far more practical to let the guy give the wrong answer, and still get away with your share of £32,000, although, of course, Charles had not at that point definitely committed himself and so there was still the chance that he would not have played and left with his £250,000. Or Ingram might have reverted to enunciating the options, thus giving Whittock his chance to cough in signal. In each of these cases, Whittock gets his cut and then the chance of his own shot to come without risking being done for his "No!".

13) WHY NEED AN ALL STOP SIGNAL ( OR TWO ) ?

Later Bashir made out that they had also devised an "... all stop signal". That was for Whittock, who had three nose and throat conditions causing him acute discomfort, to blow his nose. I don´t know what happened that night, but it could very well be that they recorded someone whispering a hissed "No!" to the person next to him, just as they must have done when I and lots of others did so at the moment when the suggestion of a wrong answer had placed a player in jeopardy.

14) OTHER INNOCENT "NO!"s

Although Chris Tarrant has been identified as the most recognised person in the country, paradoxically, in the context by which he acquired that notoriety, WWTBAM?, he is not the star: The player is. It has been suggested that the reason for the worldwide fascination with Millionaire lies in the audience´s captivation with someone engaging on a mythic quest towards a treasure whilst surmounting perils en route. This becomes the more pronounced when someone gets on to the top questions. The other circumstance in which the audience might become fully engaged is a rare occasion when a player is perceived as needy rather than greedy.

The second time I was on aired in early October 2000, and commenced with a grandmother in the chair. She needed a hip operation, the host explained, and, having been on the NHS waiting lists for years, would have it the next day if she won her needed £8,000. She reached that target and was smothered in hugs and kisses. She got the £16,000 question right too. The £32,000 question was :- "For which US President was Dan Quayle Vice-President?" There had been 42 Presidents. The answer is George Bush (senior). She need not have spoken, but instantly said "Ronald Reagan." An incorrect answer at this stage means the player leaves with just £1,000.

The 4 options appeared - George Bush, Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford. "Ronald Reagan", she immediately repeated. The host reminded her that she still had her Fifty-Fifty lifeline. She deliberated for some time, and then said that, alright, she would use that. And it left her with the options of George Bush and Ronald Reagan. She turned to him with a big smile and said: "Yes: Ronald Reagan." I, and people all around me, were hissing "No!". But we were not trying to reach the player.

Mr Tarrant remained impassive, and then reminded her that she had one remaining lifeline; "You have Phone a Friend." At the start Tarrant had mentioned that at a celebratory party the night before the lady had met the man who was then the show´s biggest winner: Peter Lee. He had offered his services as a friend to be phoned. She ruminated for some time, clearly reluctant to use it, and then relented and said that she would. Lee straight away supplied the right answer. She paused for a moment, and then said "George Bush." Her successful answer netted her £32,000. Once at that level a player can leave with no less. She was again smothered by Tarrant.

(By the way, in October 2003 Charles Ingram was also found guilty at Bournemouth Crown Court of obtaining a pecuniary advantage by deception. It was for £32,000.)

The lady got her next question wrong and so exited. It then emerged that a light bulb had blown in the studio and it took the best part of 20 minutes to fix it. This, together with the extra time spent in the chair by the contestant, meant that the recording time was reduced, so rather than the 3 Fastest Finger First rounds which we would have been able to fit in, we only got 2. I failed them both. The average amount won by a person who wins the UK FFF is circa £50,000, and five have won a million.

There are instances of Mr Tarrant directing the attention of a player to a lifeline even after the right answer has been given. But I do not think you will find one comparable to that from any of the over 100 countries where the show aired - not where a player thrice so instantaneously and unequivocally repeated the same answer as her options narrowed from 42 to 4, and then, after the host pointed out a lifeline, to 2... and only then, after the host drew her attention to the existence of her last lifeline, changed her mind. Still, he was in a difficult spot, and who is to say that many of us might not have done the same there?

So what do you think is the more likely explanation of that "No!" ( if a "No!" it were and if Whittock said it )? An attempt to reach the man in the middle, or a whispered expression of anxiety as the hero is about to stumble at the penultimate hurdle?

The BBC echoed Celador staff in reporting Tecwen Whittock´s blowing his nose at the £500,000 point as perhaps a signal that it was time to stop. Mr Kevin Duff commented "The nose blowing only ever happened at that point, and it´s only my subjective opinion but if you have a system then you´ve got to have an all stop signal." An all stop signal... That was, you understand, in case the guy had forgotten that you recite the answers and Tecwen coughs on ´A´when it´s ´A´, on ´B´when it´s B...

That such an item could have appeared beggars belief. I am reminded of the sketch from the BBC comedy show Not the Nine O´Clock News where a man had been charged with - "Wearing a loud shirt in a built-up area. That was a comedy sketch, but since then a British court has actually had evidence presented to it that a man´s blowing of his nose was a criminal act. No mention on their documentary of Whittock´s three diagnosed reasons to be experiencing nose and throat problems, problems which were worsening the longer he spent in that studio without water to help him. It was, however, illustrative of the absence of concrete evidence. Another instance of known (blown) behaviour cited as suspicious.

You will note that if at any point in the evening a cough from the sector where Whittock sat comes right after Ingram mentions any INcorrect answer, then the entire prosecution stance collapses. Therefore, on the occasion where that patently does happen, they have to have some sort of story to go with it. You see what Monty Python-type nonsense they came up with by way of a serious argument. Also, there are nine tapes of the studio activity from that night, which were edited and mixed to produce the final broadcast. On only one of those nine can the disputed "No!" be made out. These tapes were in Celador´s possession throughout..

15) LISTENING OUT OR HAMMING IT UP?

The Major gave his explanation of his unfathomable performance to the Police. "I had seen other people... not go as far as they could have done... I decided I would have to do everything I could to get to the £1m... just as I'd have to do in the army. You... limit the risks to achieve the mission... The money was secondary to trying to answer the question. I... tried as best I could to delete answers that were too ridiculous and weigh up the options on the remaining answers and if I felt 80% confident... I would go for it. I just wanted to have the courage of my convictions."

Previous players had not read out the options as Ingram did. He offered an explanation: "What I was trying to do was buy time, think through the answers to whether I could get to a confident level where I could take a risk. If I was just quiet, it would not come across as very good television, which I just wanted it to be." I can follow that.

The Police asked about his treatment of the £500,000 question: "Baron Haussmann is best known for his planning for which city?" The four options were Rome, Paris, Berlin and Athens. He said that a "knee-jerk" reaction had led him to briefly consider Berlin, although he was 80% confident it was Paris - the right answer. His apparent hesitation, he maintained, was because he"...wanted to prevent Chris from interrupting, so that I could think about the question. I had a strong inkling that it could have been Paris. I thought back to the 19th century. I have read a lot of history." In court, he expounded further. He said his discursive and apparently indecisive manner when answering questions was partly for dramatic effect. "There was a degree of wishing to be good on television and be a bit dramatic. What I said and what I actually meant were not the same thing. It was a very stressful period. I was under the cameras."

In retrospect, we may see why this conduct looked so suspicious (and after all the brouhaha, nobody will ever behave like that again!). But consider how daft Ingram would have been to recite an answer, saying that he felt sure that it was not right, only to minutes later choose that very one (as he did at question 14) if he were listening out for signals. Would it not have made much more sense to have said that he were UNsure if it were right? However difficult they may have hoped it would prove to spot the (uncoded) coughs, surely a fraudster in the spotlight would have uppermost in his mind how his own behaviour would come across?

Major Fraud claimed that this was because he had forgotten the procedure of checking slowly around the four answers whilst listening out for Whittock´s cough of confirmation. As I have already noted, he had actually given his first supposition, correctly, about what he thought to be the right answer to Questions 8, 9, 11, 12 and 13 soon after the host had finished reading them out and before any cough was heard. That very seriously challenges the notion that he was slowly checking around the 4 possible answers whilst awaiting a signal. If that were his game, then why not just go "It might be ´A´, or it might be ´B´, or ´C´, or even ´D´..."? Too naive? Well, hardly any more naive than using uncoded coughs.

Celador grant players unlimited thinking time. In my opinion they ought not to. Ingram said he was hamming it up for dramatic effect at Questions 14 and 15, i.e TRYING to appear egregious, whilst he thought things through to the point where he had reached a sufficient level of confidence before ultimately committing himself on the 2 biggest financial decisions of his life. I find his explanation the more plausible.

David Edwards, the second winner of the million, has queried Ingram´s handling of the last question: "A number one followed by one hundred zeros is known by what name?" "... That a googol is 10 to the power of 100 is quite esoteric knowledge... but I was surprised that an... engineering graduate made no reasoned attempt to eliminate the three distractors..." (gigabit, megatron and nanomole) "... a professional with a scientific/engineering background did not at any stage identify any of the prefixes, "mega-", "giga-"; and "nano" as most definitely not 10 to the power of 100, even citing two of those options as the most likely at one stage! Does this suggest that Major Ingram's choice of answer was founded on something other than cold reason?"

Again this behaviour seems to me TOO odd to sit happily with a simple signalling scam, for Mr Edwards is, of course, right to think that such a man WOULD identify these prefixes! Ingram says that before he played he did eliminate some. It would be far more suspicious were a simple man (as Celador incorrectly thought him to be when they called in the Police) to have taken what looked like a shot in the dark. Rather than supporting the idea of fraud, Mr Edwards´ observation undercuts it. He is also incorrect to state that Ingram cited two of the other answers as the most plausible. Ingram in fact only cited one of them as his initially preferred idea of the correct answer. David Edwards attached great significance to the number of these so called ´significant coughs´, and produced calculations showing that when they came was so cumulatively unlikely that it had not to be chance. I agree, but see Point (1).

16) WHY SO MANY COUGHS?

On Major Fraud, Sound Supervisor, Kevin Duff observed that a full 19 such 'particular' coughs were very hard to explain away, whereas a smaller number might have been, and he criticised the crooks for going too far. "If they had stopped at 125,000 then I don´t think any of us would be sat here. I think they´ve pushed just that little bit too far." But why did he cough so many times for so few answers? Doesn´t it suggest that the interpretation of nervous, responsive coughing fits better than that of signalling?

Given Ingram´s age, education and IQ, and the known degree of difficulty of questions on the show, it seems certain to infer that he would have been able to answer at least 2 or 3 questions unaided of whatever 8 were thrown at him that night, does it not? (In my judgement he answered 7 unaided, with an audience gasp steering him to the correct answer on the eighth.) So why would he be listening out for signals on those questions?

How many 38 year old Mensa members, with two degrees, need prompts to say who Kennedy´s widow went on to marry, or who painted The Ambassadors? Not many, that´s for sure. Of the other questions, do not forget the statement of key prosecution witness, Whitehurst: "I did know quite a few of the answers. I expect others did too, they weren't that difficult." To repeat; the player is the focus of attention and a fraudulent one would be most conscious of the need not to appear suspicious. If Whittock knew the answer - or even if he was confident that he had gleaned it or had it affirmed from conversing with an adjacent contestant - then transmission and acceptance could be done with far fewer coughs.

Ingram´s story, like that of his wife and of Whittock, has not varied throughout. He said that when he set out he actually had "no great knowledge" about WWTBAM?. The enthusiasm that led him to try came from his brother-in-law, who began writing the book which Diana then completed. He described his first session as "unsettled" and "not very confident". So for day two he came up with a military approach. Bear that in mind when assessing how different his behaviour was to others who had gotten anywhere in the hot seat.

17) THE FRUITLESS INQUIRY

Still, there were those who doubted, and they searched for evidence. Robert Brydges scoured the audience whilst Ingram played, suspecting that someone was sending visual clues, but he could not spot it. Photographs of sections of the audience were taken whilst he was playing. They revealed nothing extraordinary. He and his wife were frisked as they left the set. Nothing was found. ( Marketing Director, Adrian Woolfe, admitted that this made him feel "incredibly disappointed".) All 200 audience members were interviewed by Scotland Yard and their mobile phone records scrutinized. All seemed in order. On Ingram´s first evening in the chair, Mrs Ingram´s brother was spotted lingering near the stage with a mobile in use, but that too became discarded as of no value to the prosecution. Just a random fact. Dawn raids on their homes and seizure of computers, notebooks and other potentially incriminating evidence, including Christmas presents, revealed nothing untoward. No evidence of a contract was ever produced.

Tabloid headlines of late 2001 claimed that anonymous letters had been put through Tarrant´s door outlining how a complex scam might have been pulled off. But the specific contents of any such letters has never been made known. Perhaps that story arose through private investigator, Edwin Pattington? Direct Line Insurance hired him in September 2001 to look into a £30,000 burglary insurance claim which Ingram had submitted, after reading about the doubts over his WWTBAM? win. He delivered a letter to Tarrant saying: "Chris, I investigate for insurance companies and your dodgy major put in a very doubtful claim. If you want to pass my numbers on to those looking into his win, I may have some background information, Regards, Eddie." Curious that Mr Pattington felt moved to do that. At the insurance trial, Ingram´s counsel suggested that he wanted to be known as the man who brought down Charles Ingram. Pattington denied it.

Hundreds of calls to four pagers were cited. Sequences such as 1111 and 2222 were left on them. But Diana Ingram said it was she alone who had used the devices to contact her brothers, Adrian and Marcus, to whom she had loaned £14,000 following her own WWTBAM? success in April 2001. They had vanished in August 2001, one month before Ingram´s win, after unlawfully procuring money and running up large debts, and refused to even answer their mobiles. "Adrian owed a lot of money to various people as I understand it", Diana said. (This makes more understandable Marcus´ reluctance to be seen on camera at the studio.) She was furious with them, and her brothers' wife and girlfriend were left in a "terrible state" by their disappearance. The men eventually got in touch, giving her several pager numbers just in case some of them did not work properly. Asked to explain numerous calls to the pagers on the eve of her husband's first appearance on WWTBAM?, Mrs Ingram said she understood some of them were faulty and this was her way of ensuring her brothers knew she wanted one of them to contact her. Unfortunately, she had never been aware you could send text messages on pagers.

Prosecutor Hilliard pointed out that her brother Marcus was in the studio on the night of September 9th and would not have needed to be contacted in that way. But look how cagily this man, who had very understandable reasons neither to want to show his face on TV nor to answer a mobile, was behaving. That his own sister had to still use this odd mode of contact does not jar with the way he was then seen to be conducting his affairs. Mr Hilliard then asked if she could explain why she had used a variety of telephones one evening

"Your land line at home at 18.03, your mother's mobile at 18.04, the land line again also at 18.04, your mother's mobile at 18.05 and then back to your land line." Mrs Ingram said, "Well, no not really, I just did." It was suggested that they had the pagers at home and were simply "practising" to find out which message arrived first - one from a landline or one from a mobile. She denied it. Hilliard then suggested the pagers represented the four possible answers. "No" , she replied. "They communicated information either to your husband in the hot seat or somebody in the audience so they could help," he continued. "No, that is not true." He suggested, that, for some reason, the couple abandoned that plan and resorted to coughing after learning Whittock was to be there when her husband returned as a contestant. "Most definitely not", she said.

There is no evidence that such a scheme involving pagers was used when Ingram played. And it would be workable with just one. The separate buzzes could be counted and the correct answer thus registered whilst he appeared to be pondering. Obvious scenarios with three or two pagers also spring to mind. The less wired up you are, the more likely to escape detection. Why mess about with four? On Major Fraud, Detective Sergeant Williamson stated that he thought that the original plan had been for Marcus Powell to transmit the questions down his mobile phone to someone who had access to research material. That person would then signal one of the 4 pagers, which Ingram or someone else would have secreted about his person, thereby indicating the correct answer.

Contestants are advised to wear light clothing - it´s a hot studio. On each evening Major Ingram wore the same clothes; a short sleeved rugby shirt and jeans. Also, as he would have known, all contestants will have a microphone of about the size of a packet of cigarettes inserted on their person - usually on their back beneath their shirt. Where were the pagers to have been hidden on Ingram?

18) THE IDEA BEHIND THE LYNCH LAW TV AD IS DROPPED

Within a month of Ingram´s win a TV advert went out during a broadcast of another edition of WWTBAM? showing a man in a pub quiz secretly accessing the answer to a question by mobile phone. This happened to be "googol", which by then the nation knew to be the answer to Ingram´s £1,000,000 question. The ad had been deliberately placed in that slot - I´ve sold ad space - and it is scandalous that this was permitted, and akin to lynch law. It was symptomatic of, as well as helping to further support, the popular view that Ingram was guilty. And it contributed to moving that idea along past the status of an urban myth to something more like an established verity.

It was not just the recital of options, the unexpected success and the switching from initially preferred answers on the last two questions which fostered the belief that some method of answering with certainty had to have been used. Most significant, I believe, was that the full million had been taken. The pushing "...that bit too far" to which Mr Duff referred, may have been the amount of money rather than the amount of coughs, for by the £125,000 stage, the coughs were already considerably more than would have been needed for signalling purposes. And Whittock´s diagnosed cough problems were worsening.

Equally bogus was Larry Whitehurst´s claim on the ITV TV Cheats programme of November 2003. On the £1,000,000 Question he claimed: "My attention becomes focused on Tecwen Whittock - the guy who´s been coughing ostentatiously all the way through. Every time the Major mentioned the right answer,´cough, cough´ bang on cue." In fact Ingram mentioned the right answer to that question a full 17 times before then giving it as his final answer and Whittock coughed shortly after just 4 of these.

Yet the subsequent conscientious yet fruitless investigations caused original ideas about an accomplice accessing the internet to melt away. By the time of the trial, 18 months later, the Police decided that there had been no extraneous communication, and no extensive planning. Now they were saying Whittock had the idea proposed to him the night before during a five minute call, settled it the next morning with two other short calls, and simply knew the answers, which he signalled by coughs (they may have hoped that Mrs Ingram coughed up one, but the Judge told the jury to disregard it). Not even a coded pattern of coughing, such as "One cough for yes and two coughs for no" suggested by jeering workmen when Charles entered the Bournemouth Crown Court in October 2003. Just a cough in response as he mentioned the right answer.

So I follow why, with only this emerging from an 18 month inquiry, Mr O´Neill´s Police source concedes: "I've never thought that we've been able to find every piece of the jigsaw." Some of the Police on this case were also the arresting officers in the abortive prosecution of the Royal butler, Paul Burrell. Having been left with egg on their faces following a previous action involving Charles and Diana, they may have felt the need to get a result in this one, after they had set out, however scant the actual evidence.

19) IT MUST BE TRUE!

Philosophers of science have noted that once people have a fixation that something is valid - and MUST be valid - they will tend to pad that view with all kinds of facts which are not actually supportive evidence at all: they merely represent the already-reached assumptions. This has been called 'adherence to a paradigm'. Many such instances were produced in this case. Indeed, it was when I first recognised several instances of behaviour, which were now being portrayed as suspicious or criminal, that I began to wonder whether we might have witnessed a miscarriage of justice.

20) TO COMMUNICATE OR NOT TO COMMUNICATE?

For example: -
It was noted that the Ingrams and Whittock had not spoken at the studio. Prosecutor Hilliard, argued: "Before September 10th, if there had been prior contact between the three of them, then you might expect that there might have been some contact between them when all together at the studio... Unless, of course, for some reason, the Ingrams and Mr Whittock did not want to be seen together." I cannot follow that point. Charles said he had never had contact with the man and Diana that she did not know what he looked like. When questioned about why they had never met or spoken at the studio, Whittock said that he was concentrating on the challenge ahead. On Major Fraud, standby contestant Robert Brydges said that he had just this impression of Whittock.

What ammunition do you think our learned friend would have made of any noted communications between them there? I am reminded of the moment when Tecwen Whittock protested from the witness box that the prosecution was treating the case rather like a box of chocolates, and ignoring coughs that did not fit in with their thesis. Pointing out to the prosecutor a silent moment from the tapes, where it would have been ideal for him to have placed a cough, he received the response "But you have to be careful with these coded systems, don´t you?" Whittock replied "I don´t know; I´ve never used one." Damned if you do and damned if you don´t, if Hilliard´s the prosecutor.

A roll-over contestant, as Ingram was, arrives at the studio later than the new ones, so time for them to have met would have been less. Note also that after their given purpose for the consultations - the WWTBAM? show - had passed, there were no more recorded calls.

21) NO POST-HEIST CALLS BETWEEN THE CROOKS

DS Williamson said that the Ingrams and Tecwen were not proper criminals. "They may have engaged in a criminal act, but they don't have criminal minds. They made too many stupid mistakes," e.g. they called each other on their own phones. The most stupid mistake of all - say the police - was that they made it so bloody obvious. But there was no post-heist discussion from three people who had made no attempt to disguise the earlier calls between Mrs Ingram and Whittock and who now had the distribution of £1,000,000 to sort out, was there?

21) STARING

Bashir made out that Mrs Ingram´s glances in Whittock´s direction were significant. Is the implication that a man´s choice may be influenced by someone staring at the back of his head? Who was on trial; Diana Ingram or Uri Geller? Mrs Ingram, who insisted that she knew neither where Whittock was sitting nor what he looked like, pointed out that she looked in every direction, but those other glances were not broadcast.

Incidentally, interviewed on BBC News the morning after Major Fraud first aired, Ingram pointed out that there exists a video of his wife for the whole time that he was in the chair with the time code clearly recorded on it - a video played in court - yet on the documentary she is to be seen turning leftwards more often than on that video. He asked how Celador could explain this anomaly. They have yet to.

22) NERVES

The increasingly apparent nervousness of Mrs Ingram was said to be indicative of her anxiety about the scam going too far. A neutral interpretation would be that she was just worried her husband might blow the winnings, and behaved as most wives would.

j) By the same token, Bashir commented that it was no wonder that Ingram was shaking when Tarrant handed him the £64,000 cheque as "Charles Ingram´s committing major fraud in front of a live studio audience". A fair view would be that it is a very exciting and nerve-racking thing that he was undertaking and so he was understandably nervous.

23) LONG PONDERERS?

Tarrant testified that Ingram had taken a long time to answer "... almost every single question. I was trying to work out quite where his mindset was going, which was very hard to follow. It was an extraordinary night. [Ingram's] reactions were unlike anything we had ever seen."

Yet this is false for two separate reasons:-
a) He had seen some players think for ages on almost every question. On the second time I appeared on the show he even told us at rehearsal that one such guy had asked him if he might go for a walk whilst he thought a question through. The host told him he did have a problem with that. On the first night Ingram played, September 9th 2001, an earlier contestant took twenty-four minutes to give an answer. Another precedent forgotten.

On a Christmas 2004 TV show Vanessa Feltz commented that you either know the answer or you do not, and therefore Ingram must have been faking. But she was mistaken, for some people do take their time.

b) But, even more challenging to Mr Tarrant´s statement, is the tape of Ingram´s performance that night, which has a burnt-in time code. This proves that the total time he spent in the chair in answering eight questions was fifty minutes, quite a lot of which was due to Tarrant talking, joking, heightening the tension, etc.

24) HARMLESS CHAT BETWEEN WAITING CONTESTANTS

Whittock was caught on audio conferring with the man next to him about the answers to two of the questions Ingram faced. This, it was said, was likely evidence of wrongdoing.

In fact it is commonplace.

On my first appearance, I think I discussed answers with the man on my left, Ian Phillips. On my second go I even spoke of the peril into which the granny with the gummy hip had placed herself with a lady behind me in the audience, whilst she handed me sweets!

The gentleman to whom Whittock spoke did not seem to think it at all out of order. Waiting players often discuss the answer to a question. Celador would have recorded many previous instances. But they forgot to mention those. And so on and on and on. They listed neutral fact after neutral fact, and claimed that these were of evidential value.

25) MANNERS

Floor manager, Phil Davies, pointed out that the way in which Mr Whittock was coughing "... was rather bizarre. He was actually turning towards the set to cough, so at one point he was talking towards the contestant on his left in a whispered way and then he would turn ròund a full 90 degrees with his head, cough towards the hot seat, and then turn away again." Bizarre? As Whittock pointed out in court, you do not cough into someone´s face.

26) STRANGE SURPRISE AT HIS RETURN TO WORK

Ingram´s brusque attitude towards production assistant, Eve Winstanley, was mentioned. She testified that when she offered the couple a drink afterwards in their dressing room, Ingram declined, saying that he was going back to work the next day. "My words were something like, 'work - tomorrow?' I wouldn't expect anyone to go back to work if they had just won £1m." She had already seen David Edwards do just that, 20 weeks earlier. Yet another example of memory lapse, in the witness box, from Celador personnel.

27) WHAT ROW? NORMAL BEHAVIOR FROM THEM AFTERWARDS ACCORDING TO TARRANT

The documentary claimed that they had a blazing row afterwards in their dressing room. The Ingrams deny this and the only statements to support the row are those of a security guard and Ms Winstanley who both said they heard raised voices. They need not have been raised in anger. Eve Winstanley and Rod Taylor both said that they found the atmosphere afterwards in the Ingrams´dressing room to be tense and unnatural. Mrs Ingram has said that her husband was not entirely happy about Celador staff frisking them as they left the set. That´s not the friendliest of acts.

By contrast, when Tarrant was asked by Hilliard about how he found the Ingrams to be behaving afterwards, not only in the studio but also when he, twice, visited their dressing room and drank champagne with them; "So far as the atmosphere then was concerned, did you detect anything untoward?" He testified "Not from them. No, not at all. They seemed as normal as people who had just won £1m would be in that situation. They did seem fine.

" Mr Bashir forgot to mention that. But then Tarrant was a man whom Charles had even thought had "willed me on" to victory, and had hugged him. Of course Celador people like Ms Winstanley and Rod Taylor, who had searched the Ingrams, were in reality functioning as spies.

28) AN INNOCENT REMARK

As they walked to their dressing room after the win, someone congratulated them and asked, "How did you get the Holbein question?" (at £125,000). Diana turned to Charles and said, "Oh, that was one you knew, wasn't it, darling?" This may be innocently interpreted in the context of Ingram´s stated strategy of not being certain of all of the answers but being prepared to have a go if he could eliminate some of the options to reach a level of confidence sufficient to make him think it warranted a shot. Some he did know.

29) WHY WAS THE WAY HE TOOK THE NEWS SO SUSPICIOUS?

Ingram´s calm reaction to the thunderbolt news in M.D. Paul Smith´s phone call that the cheque would not clear was cited by some as the clearest evidence of his guilt. Nonsensical. If he had done no wrong, why would he have thought that allegations of unspecified "irregularities..." would stand up? Despite his "surprise", the major said he felt it was not really a problem and "... would soon blow over. I was very confident it would be resolved very quickly. In fact we did think it might be a hoax." He had probably never heard Paul Smith´s voice before. The following week Ingram´s solicitors began proceedings for the recovery of his million.

30) NO SENSE IN STOPPING

Mr Tarrant noted that Ingram ignored his repeated warnings that wrong answers would mean big drops in money. What he seemed to be saying there was that he found the player´s decision to continue in itself suspicious behaviour. But why ought he to have stopped? Celador had previously seen only two people go for the million. One was an ex-Mastermind and the other a woman with stupendous general knowledge. They had supplied answers which they definitely knew. This man instead, eliminated what he thought to be the less plausible options, and then took his chances.

The average amount won is circa £50,000. But many people are capable of going far further if they use the lifelines judiciously, keep their nerve and get the breaks. Most prefer to play it safe, like the ludicrously conservative Scots prison officer who declined to use the answer to the £250,000 question even after Tarrant gave it to him. (We´ll be hearing more about him.) But we do see instances of people trying... and sometimes losing.Early in the history of the UK show a pilot, whom I believe refused to touch the lifelines, attempted one of the big questions, and got it wrong. Duncan Bickley was another pilot and he attempted the £500,000 question, which was on aviation. He failed, and so lost £218,000, but said afterwards that although he regretted giving the wrong answer of the two, he did not regret his decision to play. Only the one chance to win the million.

The contestant immediately before Bickley was a pilot who was also presented with a question on planes, this one for £32,000. He got it wrong. (I heard he took it badly.) The player after Bickley was a pilot, and he also unsuccessfully attempted a question. Certain types may be more likely to go for glory, notwithstanding the peril of the Icarus fall. Gary Kasparov has said: "If you don´t take risks, you don´t drink champagne."

David Briggs is one of the devisors of Millionaire. He has said that nobody should answer a question of value £125,000 or more unless they are as certain as they are of their own name. This well-intentioned advice is wrong. But it takes balls to keep going. It is certain that the mathematical naivite of Celador staff, which they shared with many a previous show player, must have added to their suspicions of Ingram. But it is often RIGHT to play on when you are not sure of the answer.

Many people are very surprised by the maths of Millionaire when they first encounter the statistics. Let´s say you are in the hot seat, faced with one of the top questions and are not certain of the answer. You have no lifelines left. Do you gamble or do you take the cheque offered enticingly in front of you? Here the concept of "Conditional Expected Value" is used, namely what is the expected outcome of earnings if you follow the "Million pound or bust" strategy. This merely determines the average pay-off you can expect, even if such a result is impossible in actuality.

You need to know two things: 1) What is your likely success rate on future (unseen) questions. 2) How clueless are you on this current question. The easiest calculation is for the £1,000,000 question. The break even point is 48.347%, so rounding up to 50% if you can definitely rule out two of the options, you should then guess.

At Question 14 - for £500,000, the numbers are based on both the pay-off if you guess right AND the likelihood of the next (unseen) question being answerable. The better the quizzer, the more you should gamble. Players who normally expect to get over 85% of their questions right should go for it even if it is a blind guess (any one of four). Those players who reckon on getting between 50 and 85% of the questions right should have a punt on a one in three chance (if one answer can be discounted). Those players who are less than 50% accurate should take a one in two chance.

At Question 13 - for £250,000, the numbers are based on both the pay-off if you guess right AND the likelihood of the next TWO (unseen) questions being answerable. Here the odds get even better for good quizzers. Anyone who normally gets 50% of the questions right should take a blind guess, and anybody between 35% and 50% should still take a one in three chance.

And at Question 12 - for £125,000, the numbers are based on both the pay-off if you guess right AND the likelihood of the next THREE (unseen) questions being answerable. Anyone with over 35% accuracy should just take a blind shot.

So, in terms of expected payoff you should play Millionaire very aggressively, especially if you are a strong player. If you were allowed to play Millionaire repeatedly then this is clearly the correct strategy. There is a huge IF however: you only get one shot at this! Most people are not prepared to risk it, and who can blame them?

My acknowlegments to Mark Labbett for those calculations.

On Major Fraud, Marketing Director Adrian Woolfe said that Ingram still being there at the £1,000,000 question "...confirmed my suspicions." Where is the sense in that statement? Ingram had declared at the start of the evening that he was going to be bolder and even said to Tarrant during his thinking through the final question " My strategy has worked so far; take it by the bit and go for it." Just before a book ("Win a million" - with Ingram´s face alongside that of his wife on the cover) was to appear, Charles found himself facing Tarrant´s 15th question. It would have helped neither his street cred, nor that of the book, had he not attempted it.

But it´s not just about odds. Maths aside, there is the focus, the adrenalin and the euphoria of it all. The atmosphere in studio 9 at Elstree is difficult to describe; it´s a unique environment. Duncan Bickley probably, may I say, felt "on a roll" when he went for it. And Ingram, ultimately, was unable to supply a coherent explanation for why he decided to play question 15. "But I did."

31) NO SUBSEQUENT FRAUD CONVICTION

The Times, amongst other quality papers, incorrectly said that he was later found guilty of another fraud. At Bournemouth Crown Court in October 2003, Ingram was found guilty of obtaining a pecuniary advantage by deception against Direct Line Insurance by falsely representing that he had made no insurance claims in the three years prior to taking a policy out in July 2001. He was given a 2 year conditional discharge.

PC Norman Brennan of the Victims of Crime Trust commented - "Ingram has yet again been allowed to stick 2 fingers up to our impotent criminal justice system. It begs the question how many serious frauds must he commit before he is sent to prison?" Most people´s idea of an insurance fraudster would be something like a guy who buys a car and then secretly sells it overseas whilst making out that it has been stolen. Not someone who makes errors in recalling the precise dates of previous claims when questioned down a telephone. Ingram said the claims he had failed to disclose had slipped his memory amid the accusations of cheating on the TV quiz show. "If I am worried about being accused of cheating on Who Wants to be a Millionaire?, the last thing I do is think about filling in an insurance form." He was found guilty of something which David Taylor of Wilts Constabulary affirmed was "not Fraud." Those concerned for victims of crime might have castigated the people who burgled the Ingrams.

32) NO CASH-IN CONFESSION

And, if it is legitimate to, as so many people have, refer to Ingram´s behaviour post-trial in incorrectly saying that he was later found guilty of another fraud, then there is one other piece of subsequent behaviour which I think could be pointed out. The stories of these 3 people have not varied throughout. A person in the UK is not allowed to profit from their crime. Interviews with them have always been gratis, with the paper making a donation to charity. But there was nothing to prevent them from selling to the foreign media the inside story of how they almost pulled it off. They never have, although at one point 3,000 journalists were clamouring for interviews and by the end of 2003 a third of a million newspaper or magazine articles on this case had appeared throughout the world. The Ingrams even hired a publicity agent, who would surely have soon spelled out to them where the big bucks lay.

Instead, Whittock lost his job and had a £10,000 fine dropped on him. Yet he has never dished the dirt on his two accomplices. The Ingrams were fined £15,000 each, lost their jobs, have been widely pilloried, shamed in the most public way and have their reputations ruined. Charles´ father, who remortgaged his house to finance the defence, may now lose his home. They have two daughters with learning disabilities and sit on the edge of a £450,000 abyss of debt, staring at imminent bankruptcy and loss of home. Yet despite the large sums of money that would have come through confession, they continued to bleat their innocence. Having lost almost everything else, the man continued to cling on to just about all he had left: his self respect. I find that very hard to follow, if they are guilty. By the way, by competing in events such as the Flora London Marathon and Channel 4´s The Games, Ingram and his wife raised over £53,000 for children's and families' charities

The problem of feedback has reared its head before on quiz shows, e.g. Runway. Tarrant has been heard to hush people in the audience - "Serious money here!" - and players have reported being influenced by gasps, as Ingram admitted he was at question 10. It has been said that the audience audibly discussing an answer, or even shouting of it out, is not that uncommon. I believe that if such sums are to be put up as prizes in open competition, and those who take risks and achieve them are to be treated in this way, then isolation of host and player might be better.

The documentary was made purely for profit. Their film will be produced for the same reason. The Managing Director of Celador, Paul Smith, said that it was: "A very funny story". Tarrant said he quite enjoyed giving his testimony. In September 2003 he told Wil Marlow of ic Berkshire - "...it was a hoot. It wasn't supposed to be but it was funny...It was extraordinary and I was going, 'Did I get that right? What have I won?' It was bizarre, a very funny day in court." Not quite so funny for the Ingrams. Charles has already contemplated suicide. ´A fortuitous, supportive texted message from his daughter, Portia, saved him.´

(33) A LAWSUIT WAITING TO HAPPEN

It seems to me that this business was really something that would sooner or later have to occur. By that I mean that the format of the show is flawed in allowing competition for the biggest ever prizes offered in open competition on TV to take place in front of an audience. Obviously player and host ought to be isolated. Then the same behaviour evinced by Ingram would not have allowed the possibility of suspicion, even. And, indeed, he would have left not with £1,000,000 but with only £1,000, for the audience gasp which patently was what influenced him to change from "A1" to "Craig David" at the £32,000 point would have been inaudible.

Sooner or later, in one of the 100 or so countries where the show has aired, some unfancied player who was prepared to have a go would win big. If his performance showed pauses, any change of preferred answer, and audience feedback, then that would have led to understandable concerns. Had we not had accusations against the cheating Major then, by now, we would certainly have heard of the cheating butcher, baker or candlestick maker.

Also after the event there would, naturally, be a greatly heightened awareness amongst all WWTBAM? production teams of any noises off. And so there would only be one such case. It just happened to be Ingram. Celador very soon, of course, realised that another unanticipated aspect of their design flaw was that they were on to a goldmine by hyping the story.

34) YET AGAIN THE ADMISSION OF THE MISSING PIECE...BUT OF WHICH JIGSAW?

(Tarrant) "People are now criticising Celador for making a huge amount of money out of the documentary... but it could so easily have gone wrong for them. There could have been a reality where the three of them were found not guilty because there was not enough concrete evidence. It was all very circumstantial. The whole story of it is so extreme and it's in the hands of a jury so it could have gone either way."

Indeed. It was all circumstantial, in what was in reality, in so many ways, a SHOW trial. In the Radio Times of January 17th 2004 he also admitted - "... we don't quite know what the Major did - Scotland Yard and the Fraud Squad have never worked out exactly what happened. I don't know how Tecwen Whittock - who came on himself, remember, and went home with only £1,000 - did it." Just as Sean O´Neill´s Police source concedes "I've never thought that we've been able to find every piece of the jigsaw." so Mr Tarrant also admits that they have never done so.

The explanation for this inability of anyone to locate, not just a key piece of the jigsaw, but the very heart of it - the means by which the crime was done - could be straightforward: There was no jigsaw.

Or at least, not the one which they were trying to assemble. If my point of 'responsive coughing' is accepted as valid, then that is the missing key piece, but of an unwelcome composite. Unwelcome for Celador in that we do now see a coherent picture. But of innocence. And there is no money in that.

So, I have pointed out some anomalies, some inconsistencies and some untruths. Only those three people know what really happened. Now it´s up to you to decide which explanation for the timing of those 19 coughs fits better with the other facts: Signals between two cheats, or innocent nervous responses? Was it justice, or business?

35) MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING? and WHO WERE THE FRAUDS?

Finally, many people wondered whether this case should have been brought at all. Judge Geoffrey Rivlin, QC said: "I am not at all sure that it was sheer greed that motivated this offence." He called the case "unique". Half an hour later, Chris Tarrant said: "This was a very cynical plan, motivated by sheer greed." and "... hugely insulting to... other contestants".

WWTBAM? had slumped from airing most nights of a week to just once a week. The interest Ingram generated could not have been purchased for tens of millions. The trial itself would displace war from some front pages. Audience figures for and telephone calls to the UK show are now up. Ingram made a fortune for Celador. Celador then rushed out the TV documentary and sold it worldwide. Now they are to make a film about it, with screenplay by Russell T. Davies. They did not have to involve the Police. Apparently there was considerable disagreement in the Crown Prosecution Service whether it ought to be a civil or a criminal prosecution. Several people, including prosecution witness, Larry Whitehurst, journalist Jon Ronson and former head of Middlesbrough CID, Ray Mallon, have said that they ought just to have witheld the money if they thought something fishy had gone on, and challenged Ingram to go after them in the Civil courts for his million. In his Northern Echo column, Mayor Mallon compared it to prosecuting a soccer player for diving in the penalty area. He asked whether Celador were not also guilty - of greed?

"I still feel there was no need for the case to come before the criminal courts at massive cost to the public in terms of money and police and court resources. I... repeat my call for Celador to donate an amount to cover the public costs." And, since Celador claimed they called in the Police to "protect the integrity of the show and against the possibility of any wrongdoing", we might ask: What about their own integrity and propriety?

Tarrant told the court he was "very aware" of the need not to give anything away that might help a contestant. "I have developed a strange, impassioned face that hopefully does not give them a clue to whether they are right or wrong. I cannot do that." He also testified: "When it gets up to serious money, and certainly when you get up to £64,000 and up to £1m, it is absolutely essential. I am very, very aware exactly what I am telling them."

Oh really? I once watched a man face the £250,000 question "What is a Bichon Frise?" It is a dog, which I did not know. Neither did he and he took Fifty-Fifty. He was still unsure so he used his last lifeline and asked the 200 people in the audience, 93% of whom said it was a dog. Almost anyone would play on. An incorrect answer meant that he still left with a tax free £32,000, and a correct one granted him £250,000 with a further £750,000 to shoot at. For most people it would be the chance of a lifetime.

But the gentleman was a Scot, for whom the disincentive of losing £93,000 weighed more heavily in his deliberations than the enormous practical and mathematical arguments in favour of saying "Dog." So he declined to continue. Smiling, but clearly finding it hard to believe that the player would not go for it, Tarrant said "Go on!". Those were not the most guarded words he ever uttered. But the opinions of 186 people, plus now that of the host, were insufficient to remove from a Scottish mind the fear that 14 others might be right. So he stayed true to character and took his money.

And imagine what might have happened had a person yielded to such a presenter´s prompt... and then it had turned out to be a WRONG answer!? Another circus of a court case, I shouldn´t wonder.

You may think that that incident - and don´t forget the earlier story of the granny who needed the £8,000 for her hip operation - is not all that important when taken in isolation, and I might not disagree too strongly. It is in the expanded context of subsequently calling in the Police against a million Pound winner on the grounds that he was given the answers that I believe someone ought to mention them.

After the verdicts, Celador said they were "... happy that the reputation and integrity of WWTBAM? remains intact". But I believe that Mr Tarrant created the opportunity for people to behave as the three defendants were found guilty of doing, for he could hardly have signalled more clearly to that obdurate Scots prison officer the route to an immediate extra £125,000 - plus the option of going for £750,000 more - had he held up a card with "I know it is a dog!" on it. Indeed that door is still open, and presently what is to stop someone in the audience, armed with laptop and loudhailer, blaring out answers which a contestant then uses all the way up to the heist of the million?

To close it, they need only have future players sign a statement - "I, Joe Bloggs, acknowledge that, WHATEVER MAY HAVE HAPPENED ON THIS SHOW IN THE PAST, if I am found to be receiving unauthorised help then I may suffer forfeiture of any prize and criminal investigation." Only thus will the integrity of WWTBAM? be restored. The prosecution of the Millionaire Three has not affected it.

I here state my reasons for seeing no evidence that Whittock told Ingram any answer. There is absolute proof that Tarrant has told a player the answer to a £250,000 question. And he called the Police in on them.

Although it was the Police who passed on a file to the CPS and then the CPS who elected to prosecute, it was Celador who called in the Police when they had the option of just witholding the prize. There did not have to be a trial. Mr Tarrant told a key untruth by testifying that he does not assist players. "I cannot do that." Had he admitted that he is known to prompt, the trial would have halted, and there would have been no need for you to have listened to me. In his closing speech, prosecutor Hilliard told the jury: "The fact that it is a quiz show does not matter, does it? Nobody forces you to play. He (Ingram) was not made to take part. But if you decide to, there are rules." Indeed. There ARE rules. But the British public does not mind when some people break them.

An entertainment company will not let such a heaven-sent opportunity slip by, and, following their documentary, their film will spotlight this matter again. Including such issues as Tarrant having told big money winners the answers and later denying from the witness box that he ever did. When Ingram resumed the contestant´s chair for his second day of questioning, the host asked if he had changed his strategy. He replied that he now thought he had been too cautious when first questioned. So he was going over to counterattack.

In reviewing the standards of evidence presented by Celador, including several examples of deliberate lies in their documentary and false testimony from their personnel to the court, I am left wondering just who were the perpetrators of any Major Fraud. And I would advise Mr Russell T. Davies to draft more than one ending for that screenplay.

News Spike

Wednesday, 6 May 2020

The Game Theory of Cash Mountain

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