Quiz: ‘The Coughing Major IS guilty’, says Claudia Rosencrantz

The morning after Major Charles Ingram won £1 million on the game show Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?, the show’s producer, Paul Smith, called Claudia Rosencrantz (portrayed on TB by Aisling Bea) sounding concerned.

‘He said, “Look, I’ve been up all night and something very weird has gone on. Something’s not quite right.” So we agreed we’d meet at his office at about 2pm and get Scotland Yard involved,’ she says.

Claudia arranged for the £1 million cheque that had been handed to Charles – a major in the British Army – and his wife, Diana, the night before to be cancelled. Then they all watched back an unedited version of the show. ‘Everything he was doing was so odd,’ she says. ‘There was absolutely no one in the room at the end of it who had any doubt whatsoever that something very peculiar had gone on. He didn’t know the answers!’

The incident in 2001 became known as the Coughing Major scandal – and Major Charles and Diana were convicted and given a suspended sentence for cheating their way to victory by collaborating with another contestant who coughed to indicate the correct answers. Last week, in a meta move that has proved genius for ITV’s ratings once again, the channel aired Quiz, a drama about the scandal. The three-part mini-series quickly became one of the most talked about programmes of this year.

In ITV's Quiz (which aired last week and is now available on catch-up) Matthew Macfadyen and Sian Clifford play the Ingrams, Michael Sheen is an amusingly convincing Chris Tarrant and Aisling Bea plays Claudia. The writer of Quiz, James Graham, interviewed people like Claudia who were there at the time. ‘He spent a lot of time with the Ingrams, which I thought was interesting,’ she adds.

You’d think that Claudia would have gobbled up the series immediately, but no. ‘Memories are very powerful things and I have such a powerful memory of everything and if you watch a dramatisation which is riddled with inaccuracies... I didn’t want to mess with my factual memories. Loads of things James put in the script didn’t happen.’

The Ingrams have always maintained their innocence and last week announced they were going to appeal the court’s guilty verdict. Whether or not they did cheat has been left open ended in Quiz. Claudia, however, is unwavering in her belief that they did. ‘The right verdict was reached in the court case, obviously. This is just James’s version of something that he wrote an entertaining piece around. I have no doubt about any of it. If you watch the Martin Bashir documentary that went out about it with the show unedited, you can hear it for yourself. It’s fascinating.’

As controller of entertainment at ITV at the time, it was Claudia who commissioned the show in 1998. She was at the vanguard of a new dawn for TV, where shows that could transform contestants’ lives or turn them into celebrities were emerging. She went on to commission Pop Idol, I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here! and the original Love Island. ‘I couldn’t stand being beaten by Big Brother,’ she says. ‘It struck me that celebrities dated each other all the time anyway, so why don’t we just watch it?’

More recently, Claudia and Adrian Woolfe, who she worked with during her Millionaire days – and who was among the first to grow suspicious of the major’s behaviour that night – have set up a production company called Studio 1. She’s kept in touch with many of the TV titans she’s worked with over the years, including Ant and Dec and Simon Cowell.

She’s also one of the best people to ask for lockdown viewing recommendations. ‘I’ve been watching Unorthodox and an Israeli thriller called Fauda on Netflix,’ she says. However, the first thing we’ll be watching is YouTube clips of the Coughing Major.

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