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GROUND CONTROL TO MAJOR CHARLES INGRAM – WHEN BRITAIN COUGHED UP IT’S INNOCENCE

In September 2001, we were prisoners in our own homes for a different reason. Locked in, we recoiled in collective horror as events unfolded on our TV screens.

Our innocence, destroyed, beyond all reason, beamed back to us on a shocking loop, here was a media morality tale that would change not only the way we think about ourselves but the nature of coughing.

It’s hard to believe the tremors that Major Charles Ingram’s alleged cheating on ITV’s ‘Who Wants to be a Millionaire?’ provoked.

Neck high in cynicism at the dawn of the new millennium, we thought we were beyond any form of lost innocence. TV couldn’t touch us. But touch us it did, like a tickly cough in the night that just won’t stop.

Where the 60s were defined by the 8mm Zapruder film of JFKs assassination, we had the scandal of Major Charles dressed in Blue Harbour pondering the following:
A: Coldplay
B: Toploader
C: a1
D: Craig David
Thankfully – Chri* ***rant – has kept his eye on the ball of power and seized the following videotape that ITV vowed never to screen. It was left at a social distance on our doorstep last night. Now we can see – and judge for ourselves – if the Major was innocent or guilty.

It is very clear to us: the power structure is rigged so that the truly guilty are untouchable.