AN ARMY major and his wife accused of cheating their way to a £1 million jackpot on Who Wants to be a Millionaire? may have experimented with vibrating message-pagers to deceive the television programme, a court was told yesterday.

Police investigating the alleged swindle found a series of messages sent to pagers before Major Charles Ingram took up the “hotseat” on September 9, 2001. The plan involved the use of an accomplice relaying the questions on an open mobile telephone line to a second collaborator elsewhere who could telephone one of four pagers to indicate the right answer, it was alleged.

Nicholas Hilliard, for the prosecution, asked the jury at Southwark Crown Court: “Were they practising a scheme to cheat . . . and discarded it, and used coughing instead?” The court has been told that, instead of using pagers concealed about the body, the major relied on coughs from an accomplice to help him to answer questions put by the show’s host, Chris Tarrant.

Detectives found the calls to the pagers from phones belonging to Major Ingram and his wife Diana, both 39, over the course of several weeks before he appeared on the show.

But they may have abandoned the plot and opted for the third defendant in the case, Tecwen Whittock, a college lecturer, to signal the solutions by coughing. The Ingrams and Mr Whittock, a fellow contestant, deny conspiring to dishonestly procure a £1 million cheque from Tarrant.

On the second day of his opening speech to the jury, Mr Hilliard described messages left on the day before Major Ingram appeared on the ITV programme. At 10.21am on September 8 on one of the pagers the numerical message 1111 was left. That evening the same message was sent to a pager from the Ingrams’ home telephone. Exactly the same message was sent moments later by another caller who could not be identified. The following day, shortly before the major was due in the studio, the exercise was repeated but using a different pager and sending the message 2222, Mr Hilliard said. In all, similar four-figure messages were sent to four different pagers.

“Why would anyone want to do this?” asked Mr Hilliard. “This was of course at a time when the Ingrams were waiting to take part in a quiz where you have to choose the correct answer from four options without help.

“It looks as if the point was to make the particular pager of the four vibrate and the significance appears to be in which particular pager is activated.

“Because if each of four pagers represented a different letter of the alphabet then you could signal a correct answer to a helper in the audience or to somebody actually in the hot seat who had the four pagers on them in different places by causing one particular pager to vibrate.”

Mr Hilliard asked: “Were the Ingrams practising a scheme on September 9 to cheat, even if they discarded it for some other reason, and then simply used the coughing method on September 10? There is no evidence that such a scheme was actually used on either occasion when Mr Ingram was in the hotseat.”

Mrs Ingram allegedly told police that she used the pagers to contact her brothers Adrian Pollock and Marcus Powell.

But Mr Hilliard told the jury that Mr Powell was in the studio on the night of September 9 and would not have needed to be contacted in such a way.

He also reminded the jury that there would be evidence that Mr Powell had requested a place in the studio’s VIP area and had been spotted several times with a mobile telephone. Mobile phones in that area would not interfere with the studio sound equipment, he said, and would not be detected by staff.

Mr Hilliard said earlier that Mr Whittock, 53, head of business studies at Pontypridd College, South Wales, had blamed a dust allergy and coincidence for his coughing during the recorded show, which was never broadcast. He also told police he did not know the answers to some questions he allegedly helped the major with.

The court has been told the coughs came from Mr Whittock while he was one of the “fastest finger” contestants on the programme and was sitting only ten yards behind the major.

Asked by police why his cough had disappeared after the major’s win, he had replied that he had taken advantage of a ten-minute break before his own appearance in the hotseat to drink some water.

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