Reflection: Exploiting the power of sequentiality

In 2001 in the British version of the TV series Who Wants to be a Millionaire, Major Charles Ingram won a million pounds. However, he was subsequently stripped of the prize in 2003 and charged, along with his wife, with tricking the gameshow host. The issue discussed in the court trial was did Ingram cheat and, if so, how? The answer lies in the way in which Ingram and his wife exploited the power of sequentiality to alert him to the “correct” answers. One of the most obvious cases of this – in hindsight at least – was in his winning response to the million pound question. The question itself was as follows:

Part of Ingram’s response to the question is transcribed below. We can see that he articulates each of the possible answers in turn, starting with nanomole, then megatron, and then googol. It was what happened after he said googol that eventually caught the attention of the producers of the show (T = the host, Chris Tarrant; I = Ingram).

Following Ingram’s articulation of googol as a possible although unlikely response (lines 5–6), there was noticeably marked coughing in the audience (line 8). Immediately following this Ingram started repeating googol (lines 9 and 12), eventually coming to the conclusion that the answer was googol (lines 14–15), which indeed it was. It turned out that the wife had agreed to signal an answer as correct through coughing after it was listed by Ingram. By doing so they had exploited the power of sequential placement of a seemingly meaningless cough to convey a particular meaning (i.e. that’s the correct answer), thereby enabling Ingram to go on to win the million pounds. At the time it was not obvious what was going on as anyone who attends concerts or shows would not normally consider coughing from members of the audience to be interactionally meaningful.