TV magician Paul Daniels and wife Debbie McGee are being lined up for a new Celebrity Wife Swap show.
They will change partners with trendy TV host Gail Porter and her hubby, Toploader guitarist Dan Hipgrave.
Channel 4 bosses are planning the show for next year, confident that the first Celebrity Wife Swap this Tuesday will be a big hit.
It features Big Brother's Jade Goody and Who Wants To Be A Millionaire cheat Major Charles Ingram.
For our next trick...
With people coughing when they walk by in the street, you'd think Charles and Diana Ingram, the Millionaire cheats, would want to lie low. So why are they about to appear on Wife Swap?
Diana Ingram has a migraine, but apart from that, says her husband Charles, the pair are "firing on all cylinders". It is a beautiful day in rural Wiltshire and I have found the Ingrams' house with the aid of Charles's helpful and precise instructions. He greets me at the door. "Is that your taxi driver?" he says, cheerfully indicating a man across the street.
"Charles!" barks Diana. "That's our neighbour."
It is almost two years since the Ingrams were convicted of attempting to cheat Who Wants to Be a Millionaire through a not too subtle code of coughs. Two weeks ago, they were in the news again when Charles was found guilty of insurance fraud at Bournemouth crown court. He will be sentenced on November 21, until which time his lawyers have urged him to keep a low profile. "It may be a bit late for that," says his agent, Dave Thomas, wearily. The Ingrams will appear on TV twice tomorrow, on a Channel Five quiz called 19 Keys, and on Channel 4's Celebrity Wife Swap, in which Diana exchanges places with Jade Goody from Big Brother. "Do you mind if I film you?" asks Charles as we settle down to talk. "Only I'm the subject of a BBC documentary."
Public perception of the pair - he as the daffy ex-major, she as Lady Macbeth - is something they hope their TV appearances will counter. Certainly a new side to Diana comes out in Wife Swap, in which she is shown knocking back shots, dancing in an Essex nightclub and laughing dirtily at Goody's partner Jeff's jokes. "The situation we were in [with Millionaire] wasn't very funny," she says. "So obviously the only perception people had was of me stalking around looking pretty cross. I'm not a gifted communicator." She hesitates. "I've got dozens of friends all of whom I get on with really well." Diana says she found the Lady Macbeth thing "quite funny and just slightly flattering. I mean not the homicidal bit, that's not so good, but the powerful masterminding woman, I thought, ooooh, I quite like that."
Does Charles recognise her in that description? "Um, yes, yes I do," says Charles. "Diana runs the family and I sort of fall into line." Before the Millionaire trial, the Ingram household worked like this: "I would go out to work all day and Diana would be very much the housekeeper, the house person, the house manager."
"The skivvy," says Diana.
"No," says Charles firmly. "It's an equally important job, I would be out doing the bigger things, the hunter gathering if you like, and Diana would be looking after the home, which is equally important, and I sincerely mean that."
What they both fail to register, of course, is that the "Lady Macbeth" tag referred not only to Diana's demeanour, but to the suspicion that she was the brains behind the whole madcap scheme. From his performance on Millionaire, it was thought unlikely that Charles, who his wife admits "repeats himself" in a way that "can get a little wearing," had masterminded anything. The Ingrams claim they were fitted up, that, as Charles puts it, the public has been "conned" and the ITV documentary on them "thoroughly dishonest". The exact nature of this con is not, they say, something they can go into at the present time, although, God willing, the truth will eventually out. Suffice to say, Charles has been "very disappointed" with the justice system, the media and even the public, who are, he says, "frankly, gormless". But Charles, I say, they have only responded to the fact that you have two guilty verdicts under your belt. "Well, quite," says Charles, blinking. "But they could question it."
Guilty or not, the couple have had a lot to put up with over the past two years. People cough when they walk down the street. After the trial, "friends" of the family would call round, ask a lot of curious questions, then sell the quotes to the tabloids. There is a scene in Wife Swap in which Goody's partner Jeff persuades Diana to have a go on a pub Millionaire machine. Everyone in the joint starts hacking hysterically while Diana plays on, stoney-faced. All of which makes it incredible that they agreed to go on the show in the first place. Why don't they do as their lawyers suggest and keep a low profile?
"We wanted to set the record straight," says Charles. "It was an opportunity to let people know that I'm not a thicko and Diana's not Lady Macbeth and we are just normal people from, frankly, middle England, and outside of the case they trod on all sorts of issues about us that were simply unfair." The Ingrams believe that people took extra delight in kicking them because of where they came from, the snooty middle classes and the army. After the trial, the army asked him to leave, which he says is fair enough. But they also stripped him of his rank. "That hurt," he says and it is the saddest he looks all interview.
This is the odd thing about the Ingrams; they are by turns dementedly cheerful and crazily suicidal. Charles told the Mirror last week that he was so depressed that "the chances of my being alive by Christmas are pretty remote". There are legal costs of some £400,000 to pay and a possible - although unlikely - jail sentence attending Charles's fraud conviction. And yet tomorrow night, the couple will be seen capering about on Channel 4 making light of the situation. Surely, I ask, they are undermining their claim to be victims of a miscarriage of justice? "I don't think so," says Charles. "I don't see why they can't lie in parallel. There are times when you need to be serious and times when you can be lighthearted."
But in this case, one compromises the other.
"Well, I don't think so," says Diana. "Life goes on. If you carry on letting things eat away at you, you'd go mad. I think most peple have made up their minds about what happened anyway, one way or another."
"It's a very interesting angle actually," says Charles. "Most people treat the whole thing as a joke. You can ask the taxi driver on the way back and he'll probably use the word joke in the sentence." (I do ask him, and he uses the words "obviously guilty" and "nice couple".)
There have been messages of support. Charles runs to get a card sent to him by an 11-year-old boy from Cheshire. "Please don't be sad," it reads. "I think you're great. I think you're clever and I like you." And he is encouraged by his and his wife's place in the culture, which he hopes they may at some point turn into financial gain. "Countless people who have coughed on television, Tony Blair coughing in parliament - I mean, goodness knows how many times we've been recorded in Hansard. Everyone short of the justice system treats it as a joke and we draw strength from that."
In a way, don't he and Diana feel grateful to Celador, the makers of Millionaire - who themselves made millions out of the episode and are thus widely thought to have forfeited their place on the moral high ground - for having launched their celebrity careers? "No," they say in unison. Any hard feelings towards Chris Tarrant? Charles asks to go off the record. He talks bitterly for five minutes. Suffice to say hard feelings remain. "One day it will come out," he says. "But I really need to get it back to Wife Swap, or I'll get told off."
He talks for a bit about the lessons Jade Goody learnt from the experience of living with him for a week. "She learnt that, as her family grows, she'll need to be more selfless. She realised she needs to listen more." The two had a shouting match in the kitchen at one point, during which Goody accused Charles of shirking his domestic responsibilities. "The bottom line is, nothing sensible came out of that in terms of debate," he says. "That's what she took away from it."
Did you take anything away from it? Charles thinks for a minute. "No. I didn't really learn anything from that row. I mean Diana and I, I hate to sound perfect, but we discuss things in a selfless way."
It wasn't very selfless the way you banged on about sex and made Diana look really embarrassed. Diana squeals.
"Really?" says Charles.
"I couldn't believe it," says Diana.
"Excellent!" says Charles. "But they asked me the question." (The question was, will you miss sex, to which he replied, "God, I'll miss it, you won't, but I will, I needed a top-up last night," while his wife puts her head in her hands.)
"You could've said I'd really rather not talk about it," says Diana. "My mother will watch that. And the children."
Forgotten in all this are the couple's three school-age daughters: Rosie, Portia and Hesther. I ask if they have been bullied. "It depends on what you mean by bullying," says Charles. "Physically, definitely not." Their schools, he says, have been marvellous and they seem to be coping well, finding it funny and so on. He thinks that by appearing in Wife Swap, he and Diana will give them some vital "street cred".
After the sentencing, of course, they might have more to contend with than embarrasment. It's possible that Charles will go to jail, isn't it?
"No," he says immediately.
"Well, Charles, basically, you don't know what's going to happen, it depends what the judge decides." Diana sounds suddenly weary.
"But I won't be going to prison."
"Well, you don't know. You just don't know."
"Well I do, actually."
"You don't. What, you've asked him? What are your intentions, judge?"
"You don't go to prison for forgetting previous claims on your insurance forms. You see, the insurance case came first and it was the CPS who decided to -"
"This is not about Wife Swap."
"Yeah I know, but." Charles says the charges against him are "pathetic" and that he is being persecuted "because of who I am." He looks forlorn. "Still, back to Wife Swap."
The couple have yet to see the programme. They will watch it tomorrow night with everybody else. They ask me how they come across and I answer honestly: sweet, touching, as the taxi driver said, a nice couple, particularly Diana who, after initial doubts, takes to Essex-boy Jeff and is charm itself by the end of the show. There is one scene, however, which they might find difficult to watch, in which Goody says to camera: "I don't like liars."
"Oh," says Charles, darkening. "Is that said on the programme? That's interesting. She's got a cheek." He darkens further. "I worked my socks off to make sure that everything went tickety-boo and then she had the audacity to... the household manual... Diana was honest in hers... the rules weren't supposed to be like that . . . she was supposed to be doing her share of things. She didn't. She didn't."
So she cheated? Charles looks furious.
"Oh yeah. She cheated. She did cheat. And she should be the first to admit it."
Emma Brockes
Monday November 10, 2003
The Guardian
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