COUGHING UP Who Wants To Be A Millionaire risks ANOTHER coughing scandal as contestant’s wife suffers coughing fit during filming

HE won a whopping £500,000 on last night’s Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, but Andrew Fanko says missing out on the top prize wasn’t the only stress of the night.

The 44-year-old had his wife, a fellow quizzer, supporting him in the audience and he was terrified she’d cough during filming and cause another scandal.

The show was famously embroiled in a cheating drama in 2001 when Major Charles Ingram won £1million, but the prize was withheld after bosses discovered his wife Diana and pal Tecwen Whittock were helping him by coughing when he read out the correct answer.

And Andrew was determined history wouldn’t repeat itself when he sat in the hot seat.

Asked if his wife Frankie was nervous about coughing during filming, Andrew admitted: “To be honest, yes!

“I remember once we went to Stratford On Avon, years ago, and she did have a really bad cough, we went to watch a show at the RSA and she did cough through that.

“So yeah, we did definitely discuss beforehand, ‘for goodness sake, try not to make any noise!’”

Andrew, who lives in Market Harborough, Leicestershire, narrowly missed out on the top prize when he didn’t know Lord Andrew Lloyd Webber is an EGOT winner, having won an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and a Tony.

In tense scenes Andrew used his ‘ask the audience’ lifeline, but they incorrectly said the answer was Bette Midler.

Andrew refused to risk it and cut his losses at £500,000.

But he says he has no regrets: “I’m fine with it. Honestly.

“The only way I wouldn’t have been fine with just missing out is if I had known the answer to the million pound question and not gone for it, but I just didn’t know it.

“So it is the best of all worlds really because I’ve been able to win a really life changing sum of money, genuinely life changing, and I know I couldn’t have done any better.

“So yeah, I have no regrets at all.

“The only thing I do know is that there will be lots of people who I know from the quiz world who will know the answer to that question.

“The EGOT winners is a list that you can learn. There’s only about 16 of them or something like that. And it is a list that people may have learned.

“And if a couple of names had come up, if Viola Davis had been there, if Richard Rogers had been there, if Robert Lopez had been there I would have known that.

“But I just didn’t know that Andrew Lloyd Webber had won the whole lot.

“So yeah, no regrets really, other than it’s the sort of thing that I might have learned at some point, I just haven’t gotten around to it!”

The dad-of-one is no stranger to winning a quiz show having already triumphed on Only Connect, he got to the semi-final on Mastermind and he bagged £33,000 on Eggheads after teaming up with Frankie and their friends.

But this is his biggest prize to date and he says it couldn’t come at a better time as his and wife Frankie’s careers have been decimated by artificial intelligence.

They have both worked as freelance translators for the last 20 years but computer software has made times tough.

Andrew, who can speak French, Spanish and Italian said: “It’s come at a really, really lovely time.

“First because our work has been kind of thrown under the bus a bit in the last few years because of AI.

“We are both translators and the freelance translation market has pretty much died to death in the last five to 10 years so although I’m lucky enough to have an in-house position at the moment.

“I don’t know how long that’s going to last, and Frankie’s work has dried up quite a lot, so this will really make a huge difference to us.

“We genuinely were getting pretty concerned about the work situation. It was getting pretty stressful.

“Knowing that it is gonna come in fairly soon has been absolutely massive for us. It’s made a huge difference.”

The pair have a six-year-old daughter, Jemima, together but have yet to tell her about their win.

And while they considered taking her to Disneyland, those plans are on ice as they’re going to use the cash for something a little more practical.