Millionaire - Did they cheat??

I would suggest he, the major, is a flawed character but what a name Tecwen Whittock has! It's not a name to hide behind but apparently, now in his 70s he does live out of the limelight.

As someone said he has since been done for fraud and on the radio yesterday they said he has been made bankrupt four times!!

Yes I m pretty sure they cheated just my opinion mind as good as anyone else’s I guess

Not sure how true any of the evidence in court was ( to the real thing) as no jury could have found them guilty otherwise.
As a drama based loosely on a real case it was interesting and entertaining though.
If they were guilty then they lost so much in every way by the cheating, but if not, then even more so.They were certainly obsessed as a family by quizzing and gaining money.

Nor fastest brain.

I always remember the answers in the middle of the night!!

You'd never win 'Fastest Finger,' Calli

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

Nor for punctuation only joking !!

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

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?

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?"

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Who wrote the script?

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

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

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 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 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.

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.

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.

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