Major 'considered vibrating pagers to win £1m prize'

Vibrating pagers may have formed part of a plot to cheat the television quiz show Who Wants to Be a Millionaireout of its £1m prize, a court was told yesterday.

Police uncovered a series of unusual calls to pagers belonging to Major Charles Ingram, who, with his wife, Diana, and a college lecturer, Tecwen Whittock, is accused of defrauding the programme maker Celador out of £1m.

On the second day of the trial, Southwark Crown Court was told how months before the 39-year-old former Royal Engineer made his television appearance, a series of messages had been sent to pagers from the couple's phones. Nicholas Hilliard, for the prosecution, told the court it might have been possible for an accomplice to signal the correct answer to Major Ingram using four pagers hidden in the contestant's clothing.

Mr Hilliard said: "If each of the four pagers represented a different letter of the alphabet –one as answer A, the other as answer B, the third as 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."

But Mr Hilliard suggested the scheme may have been abandoned as "too risky", leading the Ingrams to opt for a "coughing method" instead.

Major Ingram, his wife and Mr Whittock deny that they "procured a valuable security by deception" by dishonestly getting the show's presenter, Chris Tarrant, to sign the £1m prize cheque in September 2001. The trial was adjourned until today.