Plaskett and Woffinden's book on the "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?" Fraud

[James Plaskett]

Absolutely Chris.
Just play the numerous coughs in the same locations when Judith Keppel won her million, then!.
Oh, btw, those coughs were played to the jury, after I told James Graham of them, by the late Helen McCrory when playing the real life character of Ingram´s counsel, Sonia Woodley.
Had that happened for real I doubt there would have been a conviction.

I say that because of:-

a) the Golden Opinion expressed by Tarrant himself that because of "the absence of concrete evidence it was all very circumstantial, lay in the hands of the jury and could easily have gone the other way".

(Do NOT forget Tarrant said that please, Mr McCready.)
and

b) The jury taking over thirteen and a half hours to deliberate, and that does not include a weekend, until the foreman emerged on the Monday afternoon to tell the judge they thought Charles Ingram and Tecwen Whittock guilty but Diana to be innocent. Judge Rivlin pointed out that all three were on trial for the same thing. So the foreman went back to come out again twenty minutes later with the new verdict of, "Alright, she´s guilty too."

We´re never going to know what happened.

We can say beyond any shadow of a doubt that Tarrant himself had already prompted a guy four years before the trial by simply telling him, after he said he wished to stick with his one hundred and twenty-five thousand pounds, "Oh go on!".
And Tarrant then denied that prompt UNDER OATH.

[Chris Goodall]

What has Judith Keppel got to do with Charles Ingram's selective hearing?

He heard an audience gasp.

He was unaware of any coughing whatsoever.

Which of those statements is a lie?

[MJMcCready]

Just out of curiosity, can we establish with certainty how many questions the coughing major didn't know the answer to, and relatively speaking or not, took a guess at the answer. It was more than a fair few if memory serves me correctly. But if we can establish how many questions he didn't know the answer to than according to probability, he's got a 1 in 4 chance of guessing the correct answer. So what was the probability of him guessing the sum total of questions he guessed at correctly. Let's say there were 8 questions, and its a 1 in four chance of a correct guess so that leaves a probability of what?

[IM Jack Rudd]

4^8 = 65536.

(But bear in mind that this case is a shiny marble: we're interested because the player is one who did well.)

[James Plaskett]

Mr McCready; his first preference was the right answer on five of the eight questions he faced that evening before any coughs.
That´s 1 in 1024. He jettisoned his initial preference at Questions ten, fourteen and fifteen.

Chris; that coughs are discernible on five or maybe six of the questions when an earlier winner, Keppel, mentioned a preference but before she confirmed her decision strongly supports a cause and effect mechanism. So if you think Ingram used the corresponding coughs as prompts there has to be, therefore, an indubitable case for Celador to call in the Police against her.
And, like I posted here, I did make that point to James Graham when he was writing his TV series and he did have that point made at trial to Celador MD, Paul Smith.
When Keppel appeared on the penultimate UK edition of Anne Robinson´s The Weakest Link in March 2012 (this used to be visible on Youtube) she introduced herself thus -
"My name is Judith Keppel, I was the first person to win the million on Who Wants to be a Millionaire? and (smothering a cough!) nobody coughed!".
Sorry darling but they did.
Had Paul Smith called in the Police on her she could not have provided that explanation for the concordance so would probably have to resort to the correct one.
"I did not hear any coughing".
But whilst sipping her Earl Grey he should not forget that the last person to tell them that was not believed and, subsequently, neither did a jury believe them.
So I hope you enjoy your cuppa with the cops, Judith!
He was not at all selective in his hearing. Having sat in the hot seat I have to agree with you that coughs would be audible. Especially if you repeated the options. But he was deliberately bouncing an option off the audience and so consciously listening out for their reaction.
A reaction which was generated by many more people than just one, don´t forget.

But IM Rudd is right on the money when he points out the attraction of going after a guy because he got into the big money zone!

Slumdog Millionaire took eight Oscars in 2009 and the guy who wrote the book that led to that film, Vikas Swarup, told me he based it on the Ingram case. An Indian kid answers all of the questions correctly and therefore must be cheating.
Except he wasn´t.
Martin Flood (see Wikipedia) contacted me in November 2005 and asked if I could help since he had won the top prize down under but the Aussies withheld the cheque because of just one cough. He did get paid, though.

Stuart Conquest was escorted out of the studio by Celador personnel after he laughed when I faced my 250K Question.

It is very dangerous to get beyond 125K on that show, as I personally may attest.
Ingram has called for the players to be better protected, and with that I must agree. It is simply unfair that we should be suspected of stealing our way to life-changing money because of something like one cough.
Am I not right?

[Nick Ivell]

I think Keppel showed on Eggheads that her general knowledge was far from stellar.

She must have got very lucky on Millionaire.

[James Plaskett]

So, bearing in mind the accompanying coughs (play those on the Youtube clips of her win) you find yourself moving towards sympathy for her being interviewed by the Police, eh, Nick?
NO statute of limitations in the UK!

[Chris Goodall]

Is there actually anything in the prosecution's version of events that would count as evidence of guilt in your book? Or could every element of the alleged cheating have unfolded exactly as the prosecution said it did, and yet the major still deserve to be paid his million? In other words, is this actually about facts, or about the philosophy of crime, punishment, epistemology and free will?

Suppose I went on Millionaire wearing an intelligent sock that could vibrate to indicate the likely answer to any trivia question with 90% accuracy.

Under the Plaskett theory of justice, that's not cheating, because it's only 90% accurate. I can stand up in court and say "Your Honour, I admit that the sock told me the right answer. But the video clearly shows that I didn't confirm the answer when the sock gave it to me, and instead listened out for subtle clues in the audience's reactions, based on which my confidence improved from 90% to 100%, so I am innocent."

Under any theory of justice in operation in the real world, wearing the sock is cheating. Even if it isn't the sock that takes me over the threshold of certainty. Even if it gives me the first 90% of my information, and not the last 90%. Even if it happens to give me the wrong answers eight times in a row. Even if I forget to charge the battery.

If we let people off for cheating on the grounds that (in their opinion) they didn't really need to cheat, Barry Bonds would be in the Hall of Fame.

[James Plaskett]

The only point of Bad Show was to counter every point raised by prosecution.
The afore given link to the article of July 17 2006 by Jon Ronson shows how the essay of mine which Bob and I morphed into Bad Show caused Ronson (who before reading it had thought Ingram to be 100% guilty) to say that I had succeeded in casting doubt upon every single piece of prosecution evidence.
And he heard all that evidence presented on all the eighteen days.

Your idea of having a vibrating something work with only 90% accuracy would, I am sure in the assessment of any fair minded juror, constitute cheating. It´s illicit aid, even if only 90% reliable,

Looking over it all now, some twenty years on, I see only one piece of prosecution evidence which does stand the test of time: Ingram´s handling of his 500K Question:

´Baron Haussmann is responsible for the planning of which of these cities?
Paris
Berlin
Athens
Rome´

SIX times he said he thought it to be Berlin. And then, having once dissed the option of Paris, gave Paris as his final answer, with no other explanation for the switch beyond a big grin and "I think I was wrong!"
Many people are always going to regard that as, to say the least, fishy. (In fact that alone would have caused me to stop his cheque!)
But within a little while I would have wondered if I was right to do so for that was pretty much all they ended up with.
Both Ingrams were immediately frisked before they stopped being filmed and so denied the chance to dump any wires. Nothing was found and the marketing director, Adrian Woolfe, under whose auspices that search had been carried out said the results left him "incredibly disappointed". Far more salient in the search for extraneous communications is the record of the sound engineers for they have equipment which can detect sounds we cannot. A careful check of Ingram´s 55 minutes in the chair found nothing at all irregular although, as I say, such use of a mobile would have been detected thereby.
Hartston (one of my Phone A Friends!) now says that the coughing was, perhaps, no more than an auxiliary, back up mechanism which played little part or perhaps none at all in how - somehow or other - a bent mode of getting the answer to him had to have been deployed.
You may hear on Youtube James Corden interviewing Matthew MacFadyen, who played Ingram on QUIZ and met the Ingrams when they visited the set, say he knows of a similar caucus of opinion and the actor nods.
But nobody, Hartston, MacFadyen, Corden nor those on whose behalf Corden spoke can say what this mode was!
So he either didn´t cheat or, if he did, he was very lucky or very shrewd or those terms may be applied to whoever helped him out.

I´ll throw five counterpoints at you, Chris, to mitigate your (and my! ) suspicions:

a) Usage of Lifeline Four (bouncing an option off the audience)
b) Usage of Lifeline Five (reading the host´s face for a ´tell´, i.e. a hint as to what he is thinking). To that Ingram does admit when giving his answer to his 125K Question
c) The exhilaration that, at long last, it´s happening.
All of the cramming re Kings and Queens and Periodic Tables and the real name of Anastasia and other such crap (sorry, Ms Stotskaya!) is now actualised as you are Living the Dream! Head to head with the man himself and you appreciate that Tarrant is actually real. With the tax free 250K the deployment of the two unauthorised lifelines had shown its efficacy and he can now pay off his 50K credit card debts and also buy a house cash. So he gets swept along to continue repeating options. I mean, it was bloody well working wasn´t it!?
d) The desire to entertain.
Millionaire? swept the planet because it was, as Paul Smith said, " The best soap on TV". That is due to all of life being there.
Bright lights, music, glamour, good looks, drama, joy as truly life transforming sums of money (for a slob like me) were proffered and not infrequently obtained, sorrow when people attempted a Question and failed, compassion (I once saw Tarrant embrace a guy who had been playing for his son, who had special needs, and fell back from 20K to leave with only a grand). Even sex. For I have to say I found Judith Keppel rather easy on the eye as I am sure did quite a few other guys. And probably some girls did too.
Also very important, of course, as part of this entertainment package which sat unanticipatable numbers of bums on seats globally, is humour.
e) And last, but not least, the environment is simply unique and it does tend to generate peculiar behaviour.
In Bad Show we wrote about Richard Deeley who screwed up his cheque for 32K and hurled it across the studio saying, "I don´t want that!".
According to those who knew him this was quite out of character, for he was an accountant, reserved, bespectacled and quiet.

But, even allowing for those mitigating considerations, I can no longer say, as I did when chez Ingram some years ago, that I am still 100% certain of his innocence. Because of that one piece of evidence my confidence in that has now dwindled to reside only in the 90%s. Because if you behave like that you are really asking for it and a lot of what ensued I think he deserved. Except to be convicted of a crime and denied his million pounds.

But the most extensive investigations have had to make do with the idea that he was tipped off by nothing more than the opinions of an undistinguished quizzer within the studio. A man who, as Tarrant twice published, could only win a grand himself when following Ingram into the hot seat. And that made little sense to the host.

You cannot convict on such evidence.
The word has not been made flesh.

Three things should happen tomorrow: -

1) Every host anywhere, be their name, Ivanov, Schmidt, DuPont... or Clarkson, must sign a statement that, in view of Tarrant´s "Oh go on!" to Lennon in November 1999 and subsequent false testimony when denying Under Oath that he had ever prompted a player, they will never do any such thing themselves.

2) Every player who wins Fastest Finger First anywhere should be taken aside before play begins and have it explained to them that to several times cite an option and then give another as final answer (as Ingram did on his Fourteenth Question) with no account for the switch will prompt perfectly reasonable suspicions and may lead to undesirable consequences.

3) Ingram gets paid one million pounds.

[Nick Ivell]

I find that question laughably easy for 500k.

If the galloping major was struggling with that one, he really did not have a good general knowledge. Even Keppel would have eaten that one up.

[Chris Goodall]

Nah, he guilty. Throwing out counterpoints is no more or less than what every defence lawyer does in every trial, but people are still convicted of crimes.

There's a fallacy, I think, of assuming that time clarifies matters. It can do, if it brings to light previously hidden documents, but all else being equal, time obscures. With a case that turns on people's recollections of events and the reasons for their behaviour, time always obscures. You are far less likely to get the right answer after 21 years than after a week.

[James Plaskett]

Time?
This clarification was made by Tarrant very shortly after the verdict -

"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 was so extreme and it was in the hands of a jury so it could have gone either way".

Do you catch my drift?
Do you catch Chris Tarrant´s?

Before we leave this discussion, Chris Goodall, I should like to hear if you concede the validity of my alternative argument for Ingram´s receipt of his million pounds tomorrow: that Tarrant HAD prompted Gerry Lennon two years before Ingram sat in the Hot Seat and then denied it on oath?

And whether you concede that had he admitted to that indubitable prompt in the witness box then Ingram would have walked out of court a millionaire?

If you would be so kind, Señor Goodall...

And, Nick, Charles is a qualified Civil Engineer, holds another degree in Corporate Management and is a Mensa member.

[Ian Thompson]

Charles is a qualified Civil Engineer, holds another degree in Corporate Management and is a Mensa member.

... but is not intelligent enough to avoid getting convicted for insurance fraud.

[James Plaskett]

Oh Ian, please!

We dealt with all that in Bad Show.
Tune in at 51:30 here and you´ll hear me refute your bogus claim that he was subsequently done for Insurance Fraud. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JbBSDREP6f8
A claim oft made since by Tarrant himself. And even my mate, Bill Hartston, was also taken in by it.
As, clearly, were you.

Keep awake at the back, would you?

(btw, on the Podcast I get the date and name wrong of the Fiona Bruce TV programme. It was Real Story and went out at 19:30 on Tuesday Nov 24th 2003.)

[Chris Goodall]

I was a member of Mensa. Chess champion 2013 in fact, the title that CJ thinks is terribly impressive but isn't because P(Good at chess) >> P(Mensa member ∩ Good at chess), and in fact isn't contested any more.

Apart from that one guy who thinks the moon landings weren't real and that gay marriage is a Marxist plot, what happens in Mensa is mostly gardening tips and Where Hitler Went Wrong. If I suspected someone of cheating in a way that's clever but not as clever as they think it is, and I found out they were in Mensa, my suspicion would not be assuaged. You need your wits about you to commit insurance fraud in the first place.

(You can have wonderful conversations with Mensans, one at a time. Finding topics of interest to more than two people was a struggle.)

Anyway, Chris Tarrant's SHOCKING LIE doesn't mean Ingram was innocent, any more than hearing an audience gasp does.