Paul Vallely: So who are the losers in the 'Millionaire' fraud?

Notoriety can be as big a draw on the celebrity circuit as the renown that derives from achievement

Alright, I admit it, I was one of them. Some 17 million sad specimens, me included, tuned in for what turned out to be British television's biggest non-fiction crowd-puller since Diana's funeral. Part of the attraction of Who Wants to be a Millionaire? fraud show was seeing the characters whose courtroom antics constituted the main sources of light relief during the not-very-long-but-relentless weeks of war. But there was something else.

The scam to defraud Celador, the ludicrously named TV company that makes Who Wants to be a Millionaire?, comes as near as it is possible to get to that fabled concept, the "victimless crime".

The programme makers have received the kind of publicity money cannot buy – far outweighing the £1m, even if they had had to pay it. The audience for the Major Fraud special was double that of a normal Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?. If there was any sense that the show – now in its 13th series in the UK – was flagging, it has received the kind of fillip that will keep it as the most popular quiz on TV. There is even talk of a movie being made of the unsuccessful sting, with the tabloids speculating on the cast – Bruce Willis as the dim but not very nice major, Roger Moore as speccy Teccy, Robert Redford as Tiswas Tarrant, and Cher in the Lady Macbeth/Lucretia Borgia role of scheming consort. Just wait for the money to roll in.

A casuist, of course, could make the case that the source of that cash – the hapless public – is the real victim. After all, the £30m in prize money that Tarrant has handed out over the years comes from the gullible punters who phone in – at 60p a minute – to take the test for would-be contestants. And how they ring in. The chap who became the chief prosecution witness in the Millionaire court case had phoned the show 86 times in two days to secure his moment in the Celador sun.

How are we to explain such obsessive determination? Is it a sign that, deep down, we all still cling to the Eighties slogan that greed is good? Or does the answer lie in that more ancient icon, Andy Warhol, and the great illusion of our age that celebrity is now some kind of universal entitlement, in which we need not settle for the famous 15 minutes but should go for the full hour? Either way, it seems that those who buy into all this were victims long before Major Charles Ingram came on the scene, and victims of something rather more sinister.

And it would take large amounts of human empathy even to see Charles and Diana Ingram, and Tecwen Whittock, as complete losers. True, they have lost their jobs and been landed with bills of £67,000 between them in fines and legal costs. But they can now earn £1,000 a night on the after-dinner speaking circuit. Not to mention the prospect of lucrative on-screen appearances in cough linctus adverts.

One of the curious things about the modern celebrity phenomenon is that notoriety can be as big a draw as the renown that derives from achievement. Nick Leeson may have brought down Barings Bank and lost £850m, but he is still able to charge £15,000 a talk. And if the former MP Neil Hamilton, as a bankrupt, is limited to annual earnings of £21,000, his wife Christine was able to charge a grand a night to address everything from ladies lunches to stag nights – and that was before she did so well in the C-list group-jeopardy game show I'm A Celebrity – Get Me Out Of Here!

Even after a jail sentence Jonathan "simple sword of truth" Aitken has been rehabilitated to the point where he was booked as star speaker by the Foreign Office, though not at a mega fee, for a talk to Christian civil servants entitled: "From Power to Prison to Peace". Even crime, it seems, is marketable by those who are prepared to go public with such theatrical impersonations of themselves.

An ethicist, of course, might seek refuge in a high moral tone and talk about how an erosion in standards diminishes us all. But honesty, someone once said, is about exhibiting a harmony between one's fundamental beliefs and actions. If so, all this is apt. For the carry-on behaviour of modern public life well reflects the wilful detachment from ethical concerns that characterises our live-for-the-moment society.

There was something preposterous about the Ingrams' crime, and watching the cloth-eared, cloth-brained major act it out on television only confirmed that. But the same adjective also applies to Who Wants to be a Millionaire? itself – and the avarice on which it relies. So it was apt that Major Fraud should be preposterous too, with its amplified coughs and its bogus integrity, and its portentous presentation by Martin Bashir, the man whose dealings with Michael Jackson revealed he has got journalistic duplicity off to a fine art. Between fraud and honesty, it seems, there is now a grey area – and one that modern television inhabits with apparent ease.

p.vallely@independent.co.uk