Television Magazine March 2020

The king of empathy

J

ames Graham was an undergraduate at Hull University when he became fascinated by daily press reports of the trial of a respectable home counties couple accused of cheating their way to the top prize in ITV’s Who Wants To Be a Millionaire? At the time, Millionaire was one of the biggest shows on TV, achieving audiences of more than 8 million; at its peak, an incredible 19 million tuned into the programme.

“I couldn’t believe the audacity of the crime,” recalls Graham, his eyes brightening at the memory. “The idea that someone would try to pull off a bank heist in front of the cameras, in front of a TV audience, to steal £1m was just incredible. Like everyone else in the country, I thought they definitely did it.”

Suffice to say, Major Charles Ingram (aka the Coughing Major, as the tabloids dubbed him) and his wife, Diana (sitting in the Millionaire audience, she and a family friend apparently alerted Ingram to the correct answers by

Television www.rts.org.uk March 2020

Screenwriting

As his stage play Quiz is reimagined for TV, James Graham tells Steve Clarke how he makes his characters come alive coughing discretely), were found guilty and given suspended prison sentences.

Spool forward to 2015. The stage career of the insanely prolific Graham has taken off. Thanks partly to This House, set in the Commons during the turbulent 1970s, when Labour struggled to govern, Graham has emerged as one of the most talked-about dramatists in the country. (This House would subsequently be voted the play of the decade.)

He is given a book by theatre producer William Village, Bad Show: The

Quiz, the Cough, the Millionaire Major, written by investigative journalists Bob Woffinden and James Plaskett, which casts doubt on the Ingrams’ guilt. “The proposition of the book is that the story is not what we think it is,” explains Graham. “It’s much more complicated than that. Diving into the book, it was thrilling to have my preconceptions disrupted and altered with new evidence that I’d never even considered.”

Graham is inspired to write the stage play Quiz, based on Woffinden and Plaskett’s book. The play is a huge success, nominated for an Olivier Award, and eventually transfers from Chichester to the West End, in the course of which he adds new material.

Next month, Graham’s three-part adaptation of Quiz, directed by the celebrated Stephen Frears, will be shown on ITV. It stars Matthew Macfadyen as Ingram, Michael Sheen as Millionaire presenter Chris Tarrant, Sian Clifford as Diana Ingram, and Mark Bonnar as Paul Smith, Chair of Celador Television, Millionaire’s producer.

“I had a bit of imposter syndrome �

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