Charles Ingram

just it's insane if he had gotten that wrong it would have been the biggest fail in television history but he didn't and he pulled it off and he remains a legend speaking

of who wants to be a millionaire i think we've done this in the past but you know what let's just repeat it uh there was a british army major charles ingram who won the one million dollar a one million pound jackpot in the uk version And it became a massive cheating controversy in that very moment.

The day it came to light, it became a massive cheating controversy.

And the next day, it completely died down.

And yeah, it's 14th September when we are recording this.

This will probably come out much, much later.

But interestingly enough, that huge cheating scandal, I guess Major Charles Ingram owes a little bit to Al-Qaeda for taking the spotlight away from him and for his absolutely embarrassing scandal that he was going to get caught up in.

Anyway, so that is the who wants to be millionaire and their standards and the Armani part was very interesting to me.

Um, so tell us, uh, what you were working on at the time this non-compliment occurred.

[laughing] So we were working on a production of Quiz, which is the, um, play/TV show about Charles and Diana Ingram on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?

Oh, yes.

And the coffin scandal.

I was the warm-up guy that was supposed to warm up the audience.

Oh, yeah.

I was, uh, Charles Ingram's brother-in-law.

Uh-huh.

I checked it, it's '90s, legally

... you've got to remember, I can tell you the, I can tell you the exact date of the Major Charles Ingram incident.

[laughs]

Go on.

The ICC rules that Channel 4 breached the guidelines by failing to give sufficient warning about the programme's nature and not doing enough to avoid causing gratuitous offence.

10th of September, so a day before, is the Charles Ingram coughing scandal.

Oh, really? Oh,

wow.

Mm-hmm.

But someone always does, and on September 9th, 2001, a British Army major in his late 30s named Charles Ingram is the fastest finger, so he ends up going down to the stage and taking his seat opposite the Regis Philbin of England, but first, a man named Chris Tarrant.

I'm sure that people get pissed off if I compare-

Yeah

So that's how it normally goes.

Yeah.

But Charles Ingram will prove to be no ordinary player, and he's about to go down, for better or worse, in Who Wants to Be a Millionaire history.

Oh, shit.