Sunday, March 12, 2006

(187) The dream of the Quiz Show host undone through two friends helping a player with the answers

The examples thus far listed constitute, for the most part, clear cut coincidences or sometimes groupings of two or more.
But I also recorded long chains of events, one from September 2001 and another from March 2003, where I had cobbled together clear coincidences, double entendres in speech and headlines and other, often very, very vague, possible correspondences.
The first of these, spanning twenty-five pages, I termed ´A Splurge´, and the second, much smaller, one, More of A Splurge.
Each contained a lot about the alleged fraudulent win of the top prize on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? by Major Charles Ingram, who was charged with having had assistance in answering the questions from two co-defendants; his wife, Diana, and another contestant, Tecwen Whittock.

One of the other major themes was how I was arguing with my wife about the conclusion towards I felt myself being inexorably drawn; Life is a dream.
I then experimented on March 6th 2003 by adding the Splurges to the text of what is now this blog on my word processor, by cutting and pasting them in from elsewhere on my computer files.

I had already sent articles to the editor of The Sunday Telegraph and to William Hartston at The Express, pointing out that Tarrant had done just that of which the Ingrams stood accused, but neither had wanted to publish. My countercase for the Ingrams was that if Celador proceeded then it might be Tarrant's undoing, for he had clearly urged and/or helped players on the show.

More of A Splurge ended with Major Ingram's statement of how he was going to be more forceful on the second day's questioning. Taken from the transcripts of proceedings given in The Sun, it read: When Ingram returned to the chair, wearing the same rugby shirt, the banter went

Tarrant:

"What could possibly go wrong? We are going over the top, Major. We return with Charles Ingram in the hot seat - a position he may well have been in before having served in the Falklands and Bosnia... Have you got a strategy?"

Ingram: "I have actually. I was a bit defensive on the last shoot. I started talking myself out of answers. This time I'm going on the counterattack. I'm going to be a lot more positive and show more self-commitment. You only get in the chair once."

As I pasted that second part into the text, instantaneously my wife called out to me from downstairs that a synchronicity was occurring on the TV that Sacha was watching which I would probably want to note.
She thought it was Goosebumps, but it was actually on an ITV kids show, called Seriously Weird. I had never heard of it. I went down two flights of stairs and saw that she was indicating that a kid ("Harris") was on a games show, but it was in his dream.

He was strapped to a board and under fear of dire punishment were he to fail - down a shute to some nasty end. But two of his friends appeared and helped him with the answers and thus he succeeded.

Fiona had been moving between the kitchen and the front room, and so had not picked up on all of the details, but she specified that the last question had been something like "What is making that roaring?".
The boy suggested first "A lion", and as that was wrong he moved closer to the shute.
He then ventured "A tiger", but that was not right neither, and so he edged further towards it. One of the dreamer's friends then said "A Siberian tiger", and that had led to the undoing of the host.

Instead of the boy it was the question master, who had a nasty, threatening manner and was clearly looking forward to the player failing and being punished, who was tied to the board and sent down the shute.

"This is my dream: I can control it!" the boy observed.

Straight after the show ended the TV presenter on ITV said "Aw, never mind Harris; it was only a dream. Or was it?"
I asked my son if he recognised the actor playing the quizmaster and whether he had seen him on the same programme before. He replied that he had not, but he had seen him on Liar Liar, playing the dad.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liar_Liar
This was a mis-identification, but Fiona explained that he did indeed bear a facial similarity to Jim Carrey. I think he played the character of a schoolteacher in Seriously Weird.

Chris Tarrant was once a schoolteacher.

btw, see also the content of the later coincidence at Entry 211 https://james-plasketts-coincidence-diary.blogspot.com/2007/06/210-meeting-bob-monkhouse.html


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