To laugh out loud at 'The Quiz'

[UnagiSalmonSkinRoll]

'Cancel the cheque'

I fail to see how Celador can refuse to pay him what would rightfully become his

I think they could refuse easily. They didn't need to wait for him to be found guilty to 'cancel the cheque'. They could only be forced to pay if they had a contractual obligation to and I would be very surprised if there was no clause that allowed them not to pay a winning contestant for whatever reason they liked.

The only reason to pay out now would be to avoid adverse publicity should the conviction be overturned.

Imagine them overturning the conviction and Celador handing over a cheque then Tecwen Whittoch blowing it apart by demanding his share!

Ha ha! Mind you, if they'd have been cunning they wouldn't have cancelled the cheque and would have kept quiet to see if the Ingrams did make payouts to anyone else before prosecuting.

That would've been epic! 🤣

Chris Tarrant is convinced that they are guilty. Apparently the prosecution had a very convincing closing argument but the show only showed the defence. He talks about it here

But unfortunately he says a lot that simply isn't correct. For instance, he says the prosecution has the last word in criminal trials: not so, it's the defence, then the judge.

He says that Ingrams had already been convicted of a £30K insurance fraud. Not so: it was afterwards, and related to failure to tell an insurance company about previous claims: he was given an conditional discharge.

He dismisses the issue of "production company skullduggery" but it is a serious concern that they did tamper with the recordings to enhance the coughs, and it can't be ignored that easily,

Really the reality is that the police should have kept well out of it and told Celador to sort it out through the civil courts. I suspect that, if the police actually did have a celebrity crime unit, they leapt at the chance of having a high profile case to play with.

Great thread here on the utter nonsense that the programme made of police and trial procedure - twitter.com/BPTC_Lecturer/status/1250537798718951426

He says that Ingrams had already been convicted of a £30K insurance fraud. Not so: it was afterwards, and related to failure to tell an insurance company about previous claims

They always had a rule in place that any winners who had criminal convictions were not eligible to play and thus couldn't receive any prize money, so if what Tarrant claimed had been true, Ingram would have been forced to give the money back (or failed post-winning verification to receive it in the first place), even if there had been no suspicion of cheating on the show to win it.

"Neil Muir, a builder from Wallasey, Merseyside, was a contestant on series 2 of the UK version of the show on 5-6 January, 1999. He walked away with £64,000. However, he was later stripped of his winnings after it was revealed he was a crook and had unspent criminal records, thus rendering him ineligible to enter."

I seem to recall that the cheque given on the night is just a prop, a real cheque is given later in the week, giving time for any irregularities to be cleared up.
Those criticising Judith Keppel's win, when I watched the programme I would often have to exhaust my lifelines on the earlier questions, eg pop 'culture'then fly through the 'proper' questions of general knowledge. I knew a few of the million pound questions but sitting there with all that money at stake I think I might even doubt my own name!

Great TV and I am so impressed with Michael Sheen again. What a brilliant actor.

I met some of the 'quizzers' about 15 years ago when I took part in a different TV show. The ones I met told me there was a website that listed all the pubs with a WWTBAM quiz machines and they drove around them all milking them of cash and subsequently got banned from several pubs.

I also met Chris Tarrant as I did WWTBAM myself and he is absolutely lovely. He didn't disappear between takes, he chatted to the audience. He's very tactile - big hugs. Also the set is very small and people are sat close together. it looks much larger on TV than in real life.

Can you imagine going to the bank with a £1,000,000 cheque?

I guess nowadays it would be done by bank transfer.

You'd be ages in the bank if you went to pay in £1 million! First of all they'd be checking that it was legitimate, then they'd be trying to book you in to see a financial advisor about how to invest it.

You'd be ages in the bank if you went to pay in £1 million

I bet you wouldn't be using one of those self service cheque machines...

Helen McCrory looked superb with that silver hair. I enjoyed the programme, apart from the actors who played the production staff, totally hammy.

I don’t think it was coughing. Too obvious. I think it was the pagers. Why wasn’t more discussed about the pagers? I think wife or matey on fastest finger had a recording device going back to brother or someone who then paged one of the pagers.

The pagers were to be used but the brother was caught outside phoning or paging. This was the first episode where somehow Ingram managed to get through the first few rounds. They needed a new strategy for the following day, hence Diana's phone calls to Tecwen Whittock. I wonder who came up with the idea? Very good and would have worked but for Ingram's greediness!

I seem to recall that the cheque given on the night is just a prop

No, you're wrong - they are legally binding the moment they're handed over. Banks have long been complaining about the huge charity cheques you see on telethons - every branch has had to have the joiners in to convert three normal counters into one great big one to allow space for charities paying them in since Comic Relief and Children In Need began

Interesting though that the judge gave them a suspended sentence. I wonder if he thought they weren’t guilty? IMO Unless the whole program was viewed in it’s entirety & unedited it would be difficult to reach a guilty verdict. But then I wasn’t on the jury so who knows what was discussed.

Assuming they didn't get to keep the million (and presumably Tecwen his grand as well), a custodial sentence would have been a terrible waste of public funds.

They suffered the shame and nationwide humiliation anyway and whilst they did technically steal £1m, it was money that was freely offered to them in return for answering several arbitrary questions, which could have randomly fallen within Charles' areas of knowledge or not.

In no way is it the same as if they'd conned an old lady out of her life savings by claiming that her house was about to full down without urgent massive works.

It makes a change from the norm, when we routinely see benefit and other fraudsters and financial criminals - especially anybody who steals from, embarrasses or otherwise upsets the government - locked up in the limited prison spaces available whilst violent criminals who represent a genuine danger to the public are left to roam free.

I'm not saying that people shouldn't be punished, but prison should be used appropriately. If you found out you were being housed next to a convicted criminal and could choose between the rapist or the council-tax evader, you know full well which of them would leave you permanently terrified and which one you wouldn't feel threatened by at all.

Completely agree @WeBuiltThisBuffetOnSausageRoll

There is a three part podcast called Final Answer about the show. It answers some questions about what was “real” and what “made up” particularly the third ep

I still think it would have been a better idea to work on the pager idea then go with the coughs. If you couldn’t see the cougher, someone else’s cough could have put you off. I still believe they would have used a recording device so someone could page them from offsite.

A little write-up about Paddy Spooner www.advertiserandtimes.co.uk/quiz-millionaire