Contestant may have considered vibrating pager

AN army major and his wife may have considered a vibrating pager ploy before deciding a system of coded coughing offered a better chance of winning the top prize on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?, a court heard yesterday.

The possible original scheme came to light after they and a college lecturer were arrested following Charles Ingram's apparent success on the popular TV game show.

Police discovered that for months before the 39-year-old soldier was handed his seven-figure cheque by programme host Chris Tarrant, an avalanche of numeric messages had been sent to pagers from the couple's phones.

Nicholas Hilliard, prosecuting, told London's Southward Crown Court it might have been possible for an accomplice to signal the correct answer using four pagers hidden in the contestant's clothing.

"If each of four pagers represented a different letter of the alphabet one as answer A, the other answer B, the third answer C, the fourth answer D 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 rather than any of the others," he said.

The barrister suggested the scheme may have been abandoned as "too risky" and the "coughing method" used instead.

In the dock with Ingram, 39, is his 38-year-old nursery nurse wife Diana, both of The Grange, High Street, Easterton, Wiltshire, and Tecwen Whittock, of Heol-y-Gors, Whitchurch, Cardiff, who is head of business studies an Pontypridd College, south Wales.

They each deny a single charge alleging they "procured a valuable security by deception" by dishonestly getting Mr Tarrant to sign the £1 million cheque on September 10, 2001.