Millionaire - Did they cheat??

I applied to go on the show when it started but never got a call back so I was very interested.
The trouble I had was that I read the Chris Tarrent article at the weekend which gave you a lot more information than the program did.
If I was on the jury and I only had the that information I could not find him guilty.
But, there was a lot more going on.

This was a drama so we do not have the true picture.

I am not sure if the courtroom scenes were exactly as verbatim court reports - does anyone know?

It seems odd to have televised this at this particular time and the drama was slanted to make them all appear innocent.

They will be asking the court of appeal to overturn their conviction in the near future.

MerylStreep Where can I find the Chris Tarrant article? I remember watching the programme as it happened, and you could hear the coughing. The Major came across as rather odd, all that chopping and changing, and risking losing huge sums of money by picking as the answer someone he'd just said he'd never heard of. It really did seem suspicious at the time.

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8224791/amp/Chris-Tarrant-calls-Coughing-Major-Charles-Ingram-rotter-cad-bandit-guilty.html

Yes! I’m sure you they cheated, Charles Ingram was so found guilty of insurance fraud.
They have however paid the price.
Poor kids though.

Sparklefizz. How did you manage to watch the programme "as it happened"? To the best of my knowledge, it has never been shown in its entirety. There was a special programme a couple of years afterwards on "Tonight with Trevor MacDonald", which showed some short edited clips with the coughing amplified, but that's it. I suspect you may be thinking of that.

The episode was shown on ITV2, a new digital channel, in 2003 after the programme 'A Major Fraud' hosted by Martin Bashir was shown on ITV.

I don't know if they were guilty or not guilty but, if the TV dramatisation was a fairly accurate representation of what happened, I really don't know how the jury could have found them guilty. There was, I think, a "reasonable doubt" that they might not have done it.

Anyway, the way they were treated afterwards by the usual mobs of louts was truly awful.

I read in the I today that the Ingrams are going to appeal their convictions. I wasn't aware that an appeal could be made after such a long time has elapsed.

The judge must have believed they were not guilty in spite of the verdict, hence the suspended sentence.
If they won an appeal they would get their million plus 20 years interest on top! A sizeable sum indeed.. sum indeed.

I didn't reach a conclusion one way or the other after watching the programme.

Normally the prosecution would give a summing up but

The drama was prejudiced in their favour I thought, and should not have been aired before the appeal if there is one.

Eloethan I thought there were strict time limits on appeals too.

I enjoyed this programme but was left a bit puzzled by it.
I simply can't make out if they were guilty or not.

How do we know if any of the conversations with family members or others were true or not?

Who wrote the script?

Cleverly done and cleverly executed. They deserved to have kept the money for the unique way in which it was done by fooling nearly everyone, even the judge.

I was knocked sideways by all the shenanigans that went on with the network of people working behind the scenes to enable the whole thing to happen at all! Did all those people not want a cut out of the £million, surely they didn;t go to all that trouble just to cheat the TV company?
Does that kind of thing go on with all these TV quiz programmes? What about University Challenge or Mastermind?
It rather spoiled things for me, thinking that the person isn't winning purely because they are better, quicker and more intelligent than the rest of us.

I also watched and thought it was very well done. I thought the actor who played the major Charles was particularly good.
Were they innocent?
I looked him up on Wikipedia and it seems that he was caught for fraud in more recent times.

It was a drama and some things have been changed for dramatic effect.

This is a quote from Chris Tarrant in the article mentioned above:
"Remembering the night Ingram won in 2001, Tarrant said: 'I've always said, I saw nothing. But the studio that night was like a madhouse.

'People were screaming and gasping just because he was so, you know... he's a serving British Army Major who's on, I don't know, £30k a year, rented accommodation or whatever, and he's going "oh yes £500,000, let's risk it, let's play" and all this and you think: "Why would you do that?"

I suppose the financial stakes are jot high in the programmes you mention, ExD - if there are any?
Is the Mastermind prize just a trophy?

Well, I won't get a prize for typing, will I!

Nor for punctuation only joking !!

It's not my grammar or spelling at fault, it's my fingers!

You'd never win 'Fastest Finger,' Calli