Who Wants to be a Millionaire producer reveals what really went on behind the scenes
Although she unashamedly adores populist TV, Claudia Rosencrantz has not watched Quiz, ITV’s highly popular three-part dramatization that aired across three nights of prime time this week. It’s a diverting tale of the scandal that, back in 2001, rocked Who Wants to be a Millionaire?, then one of the biggest TV shows on the planet.
As Controller of Entertainment at ITV, it was Rosencrantz who commissioned Millionaire in 1998, although initially it was called Cash Mountain and featured “a terrible pink set”.
“It would just be too weird to watch Quiz,” she tells me from in front of a well-stocked bookcase behind her desk at her home. Rosencrantz knows she’s played by Aisling Bea, a talented Irish comedienne she admires, because Andy Harries, the producer on Quiz, emailed to tell her. “I said, what’s Aisling’s English accent like, and Andy said, hopeless. She’s playing you as Irish”.
Unless you were not on this planet 20 years ago, you will recall that the nice-but-dim Major Charles Ingram was one of only five contestants in the show’s 16-year history to win the top prize of a million pounds - with a little help from his Lady Macbeth look-alike wife, Diana, and an accomplice in the audience who coughed every time the show’s host, Chris Tarrant, read out the correct answer.
ITV’s plush dramatization of one of its biggest ratings hits could be described as the ultimate meta navel-gazing. But it’s also a snapshot of an era, pre-ubiquitous internet, when TV began to offer genuinely life-changing life rafts to contestants, whether it be Big Brother (launched in 2000) or X Factor (2004). These shows were red in tooth and claw, bringing out the best and worst in participants and viewers. Millionaire became an international obsession. The format sold to 130 countries, making hundreds of millions for ITV. Celador, the production company that brought the initial concept to ITV, became a billion-pound enterprise. It also helped cement Britain’s reputation as a global superpower in the lucrative field of light entertainment. Rosencrantz only ever received a salary. Huge money is not her driving incentive.
Despite the Irish accent (Rosencrantz describes herself as “London classless”), Bea captures Rosencrantz’ ballsy, eye-rolly exuberance — and has a similarly ebullient mane of hair. The entire cast is excellent, although inevitably the star turn belongs to Michael Sheen, who distills Chris Tarrant’s lugubrious drawl and artful effortlessness with uncanny accuracy. The plot rollicks along, like a typically British heist-gone-wrong movie with a hefty dollop of nod-wink humour. It paints the Ingrams as more hapless than horrendous but, as Rosencrantz reminds us, this was not a victimless crime. “The prize money came not just from advertising revenue but from the hugely popular phone-lines that were set up to field would be contestants — the British public.” The case eventually went to court. The Ingrams were given suspended sentences with the whole circus garnering yet more publicity for the show, raising suspicions in some quarters that if not an actual set up, the imbroglio certainly wasn’t harming ITV.
Rosencrantz, while tough, is known for her integrity and insists the Ingrams’ perfidy — and the network of Millionaire “enthusiasts” who were gaming the system to get onto the show — came as a shock to everyone working on it. Although in Quiz, Sheen’s Tarrant eyes Ingram with increasing incredulity as he pivots from ludicrously wrong answer to the correct one, with no apparent logic, Tarrant has gone on record as saying at the time he suspected nothing.
“I think that’s true," says Rosencrantz. "Chris was brilliant at that job, and always wrapped up in the moment. It was Adrian [Woolfe, one of the Celador team} who first noticed something wasn’t right, at around the £32,000 mark. Ingram’s behaviour was so weird. He didn’t know anything. He was the kind of contestant who, when you ask them their name, takes the phone a friend option. Then suddenly he’s answering everything correctly. When they played back the tapes afterwards, the evidence was incontrovertible. Every question, we’d wait for the cough when Chris read out the right answer, and every time, it came.
"The other weird thing was that after the show, the Ingrams had a massive row in his dressing room. Who does that after winning a million pounds? We think it’s because they had an agreement that Charles would stop when he got to £250,000.” If the Major had exercised more restraint, Rosencrantz says, they’d have got away with it. “It’s because winning a million was so rare that he came under so much scrutiny”.
Curiously, from today’s more security-conscious perspective, while the audience was instructed not to take their mobiles in, no one was searched. Google wasn’t yet the go-to recourse for knowledge and no one had smart phones. The verdict remains contentious because, as the Ingrams’ barrister pointed out, there were many coughs in the audience that night. The only reason ITV managed to identify the Cougher in Chief as Tecwen Whittock, explains Rosencrantz, is that Adrian Woolfe had licenced the set that night to About a Boy — the Hugh Grant film of Nicky Hornby’s novel. “There’s a scene in the film where they go to an episode of Millionaire, and because they were going to film the audience as well, we had to get them all to sign consent forms. Otherwise we’d never have known who was sitting where. That was pure fluke”.
While the Ingrams became a national laughing-stock, Millionaire and all associated with it continued to flourish until Tarrant finally stepped down in 2014. (It was later revived with Jeremy Clarkson as host). Rosencrantz, who began her career as a picture editor on The Telegraph, went on to commission Pop Idol, I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here, Hell’s Kitchen, The X Factor, Britain’s Got Talent, And & Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway and the original Love Island.
The latter came about, she says, because “summer after summer, ITV got hammered by Channel 4’s Big Brother". Fascinated by the way celebrities all date each other, she dreamed up a scenario that would parachute Z-listers onto an island in Fiji. Patrick Kielty and Kelly Brook, one time “paramour” of George Clooney, hosted. Abby Titmus, whose claim to fame was equally tenuous, was one of the first contestants. “It was a very, very slow burn. But eventually it beat Big Brother every night it was on.”
Rosencrantz, now a fellow of the Royal Television Society, is responsible for four of the UK’s top ten most watched shows this millennium. It’s quite something for a girl who was so average at school (Queen’s College in Harley Street, alma mater of the explorer Gertrude Bell, Anna Wintour, Jacqueline du Pre and countless other alpha personalities), that her kindly father felt obliged to intervene — “which only made the teachers hate me more”. Her father, who was born in 1895, had fought for Germany in the first world war but, as a Jew, had had to flee in the 1930s. Her mother escaped to England on the Kindertransport. One psyche training course Rosencrantz had to attend at work spotted that while she was supremely risk averse, her career is spattered with high risk decisions — she has a habit of leaving jobs the moment she gets bored.
That must help in the high stakes ratings wars (she says her male bosses at ITV were always supportive of her gambles). But another reason for her phenomenal track record is that she genuinely loves her shows. The opposite of what the TV critic AA Gill used to call the Tristrams (the metropolitan elitist TV commissioners who despise much of their own output), she believes concepts like Millionaire and I’m a Celebrity contribute to social cohesion. “They brought people from five to 90 together as families to watch them — they still can.”
She left ITV in 2006, after ten years, having resuscitated light entertainment from poor relation to a revenue-generating monster. “We were still the leanest outfit. I ran 700 hours of prime time a year with one PA.” She joined Living TV, rebranded it and left a year later for Virgin Media, where she headed up eight channels, and took Jade Goody with her.
She loves Goody, who began her reality TV career as the under-educated butt of tabloid contempt on Big Brother, only to be canonised when she contracted the ovarian cancer that killed her, aged 27, in 2009. Wasn’t Goody, like Caroline Flack, the host of the re-booted Love Island, who committed suicide earlier this year, the ultimate sacrificial lamb of reality shows? “Jade knew exactly what she was doing. Being on reality shows transformed her life and brought her opportunities and an income she’d never have had otherwise. When she got ill, I promised her, we’d stop filming the moment she requested us to, and of course she’d still get her fee. But she wanted to go on shooting until the end. She was on a mission to educate young women about cervical cancer and get them tested. And she wanted to ensure she left enough money for her two young sons. She’s an incredible role model.”
She’s more guarded about Flack, with whom she didn’t work. ITV cancelled Love Island after Rosencrantz left, only to reboot it – with non celebrities and Flack as host – in 2015 on ITV2. She thinks the current Love Island, is “a fantastic re-boot” of her version, still made by her original team. I don’t get the impression she views Flack as a victim of the show per se. “Fame’s a difficult thing to navigate," she says. "People think it’s the solution to all their problems, but it can be the opposite.”
Rosencrantz herself has always kept a low profile. Despite her warmth and volubility, she’s naturally reclusive, she says. In her 20s, she lost 80 per cent of her hearing after a bout of meningitis. “I became a phenomenal lip reader”. Then, five years ago, when she was running Jamie Oliver’s media empire, she became completely deaf. “That was devastating”. The risk averse risk taker was too frightened to have any surgery that might restore it because of what it might do to her brain, and decided to retire instead.
“I was in my own private lockdown for two years because it was such a struggle to meet people — for them as well as me”. Eventually, after she was told her brain would atrophy without surgery, she had the operation. It has been a total success and she vividly recalls hearing her daughter, a professional singer, for the first time. She shows me the cochlear implant, which she has to charge each night – a daily ritual that means she will never take her hearing for granted.
Inevitably, she didn’t really retire for long. Two years ago, Adrian Woolfe persuaded her to set up Studio 1, a production company, with him. The same Woolfe who was at Celador and was the first to suspect something was up with the Major. Studio 1 is set to launch a show called Dancing With Horses and a live news service called Lit, that will roll out on Instagram, YouTube and other social media. Both sound like nothing else out there. “Exactly,” she says excitedly. “It all comes back to Millionaire, because that’s where Adrian and I first met.”
And if she were still at ITV? She’d have immediately followed Quiz with a screening of the infamous Ingrams episode, which was pulled from the schedules at the time (you can see it on YouTube).”It would have been a ratings smash”, she says.
