Saturday 31st January 2015
Bojangles Books have published Bad Show, The Quiz, The Cough, The Millionaire Major, by Bob Woffinden and James Plaskett.
The blurb inside the jacket front cover reads:
When Major Charles Ingram won the £1 million prize on ITV’s top-rated show Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?, glitter and confetti showered down on him and his wife, Diana. He was warmly congratulated as the programme’s third million-pound winner.
But within a week his triumph had turned to dust. The show’s producers believed that he had cheated. They accused him of having been guided to the correct answers by the coughing of a fellow contestant and called in the Metropolitan Police.
The possibility that there had been such brazen cheating on what was then the world’s leading TV quiz show instantly became headline news internationally. Newspapers and television stations the world over rushed to report details of the ‘coughing’ plot.
Eighteen months afterwards, at a criminal trial in London, Charles and Diana were both found guilty. Ingram had to resign his commission in the army and faced life as a ruined man. He lost not only the million-pound prize but also everything he already had. Today, more than ten years later, he is still paying the fine imposed by the judge.
But what really happened?
Bad Show tells the true story of the events of that night, what occurred during the months beforehand and what happened afterwards.
It is a story that, for all the unprecedented levels of publicity that the affair generated, has never been told before.
Hardback. 404 pages. ISBN 978-0-9930755-2-0.