14 April 2020 - TV show Quiz tells of infamous cheating scandal on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire
Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? How Quiz tells the story behind the infamous cheating scandal
Gemma Peplow (Sky News, 14/04/2020)
A number one followed by one hundred zeros is known by what name?
This was the one million pound question facing Major Charles Ingram as he sat in the famous Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? hot seat opposite host Chris Tarrant in September 2001.
Quiz review – would you like to ask the audience, Major?
Lucy Mangan (The Guardian, 13/04/2020)
Quiz people baffle me almost as much as sex people. Where do they all get the time, energy or enthusiasm? Why would you not just settle down with a good book and a packet of biscuits instead? Is it me, or is it them?
I never quite understood, then, the extent to which the Maj Charles Ingram scandal grabbed the public imagination in the early 00s. It seemed to me that to enter Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? with the apparent intention of cheating and walking away with the top prize (or thereabouts – there are suggestions in the programme that he was supposed to settle for half a mil and not draw quite so much attention to himself) is much more sensible than entering a quiz under any other conditions. Not more admirable, obviously. But much more sensible.
Fact vs Fiction: How does Quiz episode one compare to the real Who Wants To Be A Millionaire scandal?
Katie Rosseinsky (Evening Standard, 14/04/2020)
By turns utterly mundane and extremely bizarre, the Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? cheating scandal ironically had all the elements of perfect television.
Now, it's the subject of a three part ITV drama, Quiz, based on James Graham's hit play of the same name and directed by Stephen Frears.
Starring Matthew Macfadyen as Charles Ingram, later immortalised in headlines as the 'coughing major,' Sian Clifford as his wife Diana and Michael Sheen as quizmaster Chris Tarrant, Graham's drama aims to approach the controversy from all angles - and might just leave you questioning the Ingrams' guilty verdict.
'He should have stopped at £250,000': the Coughing Major cheating scandal, by those who were there
Chris Bennion (The Telegraph, 13/04/2020)
“It was an exciting time to be working in TV – there was a simplicity to the world then, pre-streaming.” Andy Harries, whose Left Bank Pictures have produced James Graham’s gripping three-part drama, Quiz, was head of comedy and drama at ITV when Who Wants to be a Millionaire? was at its 19 million-viewer zenith.
“David Liddiment had been quite brilliant in seeing Millionaire’s potential, but that show was under attack in 2001 by these middle-class obsessives in Gloucestershire, Wiltshire and Surrey.”