Charles Ingram's Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? Run
On the Sept. 9 and Sept. 10, 2001, episodes of the UK's version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, the contestant in the "hot seat" was Charles Ingram, then a major in the English army. He wasn't the first member of his family to be on the show: his wife, Diana, and his brother-in-law, Adrian Pollock, had both previously competed, each winning £32,000. Diana reportedly helped her husband practice for the show, particularly drilling him on the "Fastest Finger First" segment that determined which person from the contestant pool got to actually compete for more money. Despite this prep work, Ingram's first day on the show was largely unsuccessful: he landed at the £4,000 mark but only had one lifeline left when time ran out for the episode.
On the second day, however, his fortunes seemed to change drastically. As clips from the episode show, he chatted a lot and debated his answers out loud before answering, changing his answers frequently before he locked in a final answer — but it seemed to work, as he kept getting them right. He ultimately won the £1,000,000 prize by correctly identifying a "googol" as the correct name for a number one followed by 100 zeros. At first, all seemed well, but behind the scenes, trouble was already brewing, even minutes after Ingram's apparent victory.
The BBC reported that the first alarm was raised by Eve Winstanley, a researcher for the show who overheard the Ingrams arguing backstage after his win. Around the same time, a sound tech also alerted the higher-ups when he noticed what seemed to be a connection between Ingram locking in the right answers and the sound of a cough.