Cheating Scandal
In April 2003, British Army Major Charles Ingram, his wife Diana and college lecturer Tecwen Whittock were convicted of winning £1 million on the UK version of the show by fraudulent means when Ingram was a contestant on the show in September 2001. The allegation was that when host Chris Tarrant asked a question, Whittock, one of that edition's nine other Fastest Finger contestants, would cough in order to guide Ingram to the correct answer. Ingram won the £1 million top prize, but members of the production crew raised suspicions over Whittock's coughing along with the Ingrams' behaviour after the recording, and the police were called in to investigate. The defence claimed that Whittock simply suffered from allergies, but all three were found guilty and given suspended sentences. They maintained their innocence. After the trial, ITV screened a documentary about the scandal, along with the Ingram's entire game, complete with Whittock's coughing sounds. As a joke, Benylin cough syrup paid to have the first commercial shown during the program's ad-break.
Read more about this topic: Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?
Famous quotes containing the words cheating and/or scandal:
“It’s perversion. Don’t you see what it is? It’s not natural. To go to great expense for something you want, that’s natural. To reach out to take it, that’s human, that’s natural. But to get your pleasure from not taking, from cheating yourself deliberately like my brother did today, from not getting, from not taking. Don’t you see what a black thing that is for a man to do? How it is to hate yourself?”
—Abraham Polonsky (b. 1910)
“There is no scandal like rags, nor any crime so shameful as poverty.”
—George Farquhar (1678–1707)