Step aside, grandma
To be honest, I didn’t want to win. The prospect terrified me. Having to shout “yes” or “ere” or “yeeeeahhh” – anything except “house”, which never seems to be said – and then perhaps discovering that I had stupidly crossed out a number that hadn’t been called would have been unbearable. Social death at the Ascot of bingo, the Gala club in Tooting, south London. Luckily, I didn’t even get close.
Bingo is not for the faint-hearted. Have you tried simultaneously to check and mark four cards filled with numbers which are being read out at lightning speed by a caller on a distant stage? After half an hour my head was throbbing. (“It’s a rite of passage,” I was told later. “Get through it and you will be accepted.”) As for the additional £1-a-go games using a multicoloured plastic board – punters put their money into a slot at their tables to join in – they were completely impossible, with numbers and colours blurring into each other in my increasingly befuddled brain. Yet it appeared that none of my fellow number-crunchers was having any trouble at all. Most of the 800-strong Monday-night crowd had six cards on the go, but winners would shout before the announcer had even finished the call.
I was introduced to bingo at the age of seven by an 85-year-old aficionado of the game who used to lie next door to us in South Wales. Too frail to get out much, she used to organise lengthy bingo sessions for her grandchildren and their friends. That may have coloured my view of bingo as a game for elderly ladies with purplish hair, a view apparently shared by most other bingo sceptics, which irritates the hell out of the industry.
Bingo halls are now determined to counter that image and show that the game is not played exclusively by Vera Duckworths, though several heavily permed Vera lookalikes were in evidence in Tooting. “Many years ago it was predominantly an old person’s game,” says Eric Howell, who manages the Tooting club, “but those days have gone. You’ve always had, in my 15 years in the business, younger people coming in, males as well. The age is coming down slowly but surely, and when younger people do come in and see it, they realise it’s not such an old dears’ game after all. You don’t look out of place sat down there.”
I’m not quite sure how to take this. Does he mean I have the vibrant sheen of the celebrity players the bingo industry points to as the new face of the game – Denise Van Outen, Robbie Williams, Emma “Baby Spice” Bunton and Catherine Zeta-Jones are all said to be keen – or that I look like Vera Duckworth? I certainly feel out of place, squeezed into a seat that is too small for me and covered in ink from my felt-tip “dabber” as I anxiously try to keep up with the numbers. The large woman opposite – who is, with no obvious exertion, smoking, drinking and running six cards – looks at me with something approaching pity.
The bingo industry will bombard you with facts to show that the Duckworths are now out and the Van Outens in. Exhibit one: bingo is the most popular leisure activity for women aged between 20 and 25. They are certainly in evidence at the big-money evening session in Tooting, where most of the players are women aged between 20 and 50. They tend to come in groups for a girls’ night out, but there is also a smattering of middle-aged couples and a surprisingly large number of men, who tend to come alone.
Howell stresses the social function of the club, and says that the secret of success is to motivate the staff and produce a good atmosphere. Surveys show that two-thirds of players come for entertainment rather than potential reward, with men more likely to be motivated by the prospect of a win. The club has a lively, easy-going atmosphere, not dissimilar to that in the lounge of a large ferry where the beer is flowing and the workaday world has ben left far behind.
The Tooting club is a lovely building, a grade 1 listed former cinema with a gothic interior and a famous hall of mirrors. The auditorium has been converted to accommodate four-seater tables, but some players choose to play in the unaltered dress circle, away from the beer and burgers that are synonymous with a night at the bingo. Purists perhaps. It is a delightful venue, but, I later discover, unrepresentative of the way the industry is changing. The trend is towards new, purpose-built, out-of-town sites that aim to up the ante in terms of glitz and fun.
Gambling, the thrill – if that’s the word – of the game, the chance of winning are all important, but more central to the appeal of bingo is a sense of community. The legal requirements covering gaming insist that only club members play bingo, but that suits the halls very nicely. This is not a random assembly of individual players; this is a regular gathering of like-minded friends who belong to the club and whose club belongs to them.
“There is a real sense of ownership and possession,” says Andrew Hawkins of the advertising agency Doner Cardwell Hawkins, which is pitching for the £5m National Bingo Game Association account. “The members own the club, and you have to observe the niceties, such as not talking while games are in progress and being careful not to sit in someone’s regular seat. It absolutely is a community for certain types of people, especially women. It’s a haven – friendly, safe, welcoing, warm, inviting and cosy. They’re there for an activity, and they’re not going to get hit on by blokes.”
Traditionally, while men have gone to football and the pub, women have gone to bingo. House a film about a fading bingo hall released earlier this year, captured the importance of the place, as well as the pursuit, in the lives of the people who went there. Winning was nice, but belonging was better, and in the film routine lives are given what Hawkins calls “a touch of Las Vegas”.
Bingo is predominantly a working-class game (though the companies fight shy of the term, deeming it “politically incorrect”). It is stronger in the north than the south, and women outnumber men by three to one. The club in Tooting is open all day, and the social function it performs for older people is clear. Just as small-stakes punters will park themselves in betting shops for the whole afternoon, so elderly women will spend hours in the club, chatting, knitting, spending a few pounds to play games with relatively low payouts. The bigger prizes, including the £100,000 national game, are in the evenings, when the OAPs give way to a younger, more mixed group with a higher disposable income. It costs £10-£20 to play for an evening, more if you play all the money-in-a-slot games or develop an unhealthy interest in the fruit machines that flash and whirr at the sides of the hall and in the lobby.
The bingo industry has spent the past decade trying to update its image, not least because the lottery made a big hole on its profits in the mid-1990s. A relaxation in the rules governing the advertising of gaming allowed it to go on television last year with a campaign in which Lily Savage proclaimed that “everyone’s bingoing”, and the National Bingo Game Association is now looking for a new agency to run a TV campaign next spring.
But it has to be careful: reinvention is a dangerous business. Like New Labour, the bingo industry has to face in two directions at once – to the loyal OAPs and middle-aged women who form its heartland, and to the younger, wealthier players it would like to attract. As Richard Sowerby – the marketing director of Gala clubs and a member of the NBGA panel choosing the new agency – recognises, it is a delicate balance.
“Bingo does want to broaden its appeal to reach a younger target audience – people in their twenties and thirties,” he says. “But we have no intention of taking it away from its heartland, and there would be no sense in going upmarket.”
He certainly sees no point in bingo trying to alter the sex balance. “Most 18 to 30-year-old men want booze, music and a chance to meet girls. They don’t want bingo, and bingo doesn’t really want them. The reason bingo is so successful is that it’s the only place where women can go where it is their environment. They create it. There is no aggression, no jostling, no excessive drinking, no overt displays of masculinity. And if there are, the people in the club make it stop.” He remembers one club that introduced incentives to bring in a younger, more male audience: they changed the atmosphere, drove out the regulars and then never returned. A warning to the industry not to take the rebranding exercise too far.
Sowerby stresses the social aspect of bingo, and says that the clubs to some extent replaced the old terrace-street communities that were knocked down in the 1960s and 70s. But he argues that the chance of winning is important too in a society where gambling is becoming ever more popular. Age, he believes, is irrelevant in bingo “There is no other leisure pursuit where an 18-year-old and an 80-year-old can sit together, chat and play the game.”
Adman Hawkins thinks that the circle can be squared: that the Veras and Denises can both be attracted to the club, though not necessarily at te same time. “The franchise needs to be expanded,” he says, “but it’s not a question of going upmarket. It’s a question of making it younger and getting people to go more often. When we researched it for the pitch, we discovered that it’s a much fuller and more rounded experience than we had imagined. The sense is that it’s a stupid, ridiculous game of chance that has no skill and won’t necessarily capture your interest and attention, but that’s completely wrong. It’s intense and it’s fun.”
It is certainly intense, and the rumble of collective disappointment after each shout for a line or a full house reflects the release of tension. As for fun, well perhaps I’m not in the target market (thought I must be closer than Spectator editor Boris Johnson, who once road-tested bingo for the London Evening Standard and pronounced it “a hell of an evening’s entertainment”). I had quite a good time; enjoyed the burger, beans and chips; was surprised at how cheap the booze was; admired the friendly, upbeat staff and a manager who, after just two months at the club, seemed to be on first-name terms with all the members; went out into the drizzle afterwards with a spring in my step, even though there were no winnings in my wallet. But I can’t imagine returning very soon, or very often.
The industry wants to “position bingo as a modern-day leisure pursuit”, but, as Sowerby realises, it will have to be careful. The future doesn’t lie with interlopers such as Johnson and me, or even with groups of trendies having an exotic night out in alien cultural territory. It lies in the sense of community that has managed to survive into an age that hymns individualism and is suspicious of collective action. It lies in the continuing strength and togetherness of the working class (who, other than New Labour, says the term can’t be used), celebrating their own wins and each other’s. That’s the magic; everything else is marketing.
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