Timeshift E08 Eyes Down The Story Of Bingo

It's the early 1960s, and Britain is in the midst of a new obsession. Thousands are queuing on high streets up and down the country to take part in a growing craze. It was a game that anyone could play, and it was sweeping the nation. It made pulses race.

"Some people couldn't bingo," allowed somebody to come home with 100, you know, 200 pound in the pocket, which would be unbelievable because, in those days, 200 pounds was a lot of money. The prizes were not just cash, surprises for the scientific glamorous. So we have cruisers in the Mediterranean to want to Carlo and Biarritz. Whether they won or not, bingo had the power to keep them coming back for more. The booms seemed to arrive out of nowhere, but it packed out cinemas and theaters across the land, much to the delight of a new breed of entrepreneur. A bingo hall became the place: cheap, easy, friendly. They felt there was somebody.

But not everyone was amused. "Well, we don't like these posters put all around our beautiful old theater." The attraction of the game bewildered some. "Wouldn't you rather be doing something else?" such as, and brought out class snobbery in others. Bingo, the most mindless ritual achieved in half a million years of human evolution. Few saw the explosion coming, not least the government, whose liberalizing of the gaming laws had inadvertently created bingo mania. But it couldn't have come along at a better time. It brought communities together when they needed it most, and in its own small way, liberated the lives of many women. The 1960s have created the perfect storm for a bingo bonanza.

"I found full house. Time for fun. 41." It's one of the most popular pastimes in the UK. More people play than watch professional football, and bingo attendances are higher than those for any British Church. "I've made, yeah. It starts going in and out. Pull it out, you know, really excited, nervous, shaking, adrenaline." Today, the game is big business, with billions at stake. But all this would have been unimaginable back at a time when gambling was illegal, and bingo was a simple number game, more commonly known as Housie Housie, Lotto, or Tombola.

"The beginning. Number one." It was a popular form of entertainment for the troops in the First and Second World Wars, and as it was illegal to play for money, the prizes were instead practical items like boot polish and hair cream. Indulges in the one gambling game permitted in the Navy. "It was a very easy form of entertainment. You didn't need to carry a lot of operators. You didn't need to carry a big Petri Intel to operate it. They army could carry it in a briefcase. All the cards, they call it healthy, healthy or motto, and the army could take it all over the world. And they played it on the deserts. They played it in the jungle. It was something they could do anywhere. They took the mind of the person away from the what's happening in the world, because once you start playing bingo, you concentrate."

It was in the forces where an important aspect of the game that we're all familiar with, whether we play bingo or not, has its roots. The calls initially came from the Army and the Navy. "All the fours." But in those days, it was important to get some fun into it. So you didn't say number nine, you said "Doctor's Orders." Number nine. "Number nine was the nickname of a laxative pill issued by the Royal Navy." "66. It was too fat." "Wax the walk was a lady in the army, and there was often the jokes about there being very bonny in the uniforms, and so we'd say 'two fat wax'." And so, yeah, the cool do reflects the rather coarse humor of groups of men cooped up together. "Like seven and six." "I've heard several versions of this one from various elderly gentlemen in various Royal Naval clubs and Robbers Legion clubs." So seven and six was "She worth it?" "Some of them say it was the price of a marriage license." And the cool, but especially if your wife is next to you, is of course, "She is!" or "Look, she's still here. We're still together there." So the people cool back with that vertical. Another one, another explanation that I've heard was, "Well, if she's two of you going now, if you've picked up a nice girls take out, then you want to and six for two cinema tickets, because of one in three each. You want to know six for two nice fish and chips, upper zone to us. It's a bed and breakfast." I don't know how true that is, but I have had that one also told me several times.

This ingenuity, an injection of humor, helped make bingo so popular with the troops that the game quickly spread, first of all to the ex-servicemen's clubs, and then to the holiday camps that were springing up all over post-war Britain, where it became a staple alongside the knobby knees competition and beauty contests. "One of the main entertainment at the holiday camp was tombola. Now, this is not a secondary or subsidiary activity. For example, marques with the top that could hold 300 players, and then two sessions a day would run for three hours each. So we're not talking about something that was a minor part of a holiday camp holiday." "How did your two Pontins, or Kim, and honestly, it was, it was just like a prisoner of war camp, really. No be around then somebody and asked that be bingo in the hall in five minutes, and everybody dee dee pouches from there. We used to the hall." "If your idea of a good holiday is bingo from 10:30 in the morning until 10:30 at night, then Clapton is a dream come true."

Every day, including Sundays, the faithful are called to play. The company, two holiday camp companies, couldn't profit from bingo. That was illegal. They weren't allowed to do that. So most of the proceeds had to go to charity. And Butlins alone was in 1850,000 pounds a year from its tombola games to charity in the 1950s. So it was very popular there. It was also popular at seaside resorts and in fairgrounds. We have some lovely accounts of some tombola games, bingo games, a traveling pair grounds where the prizes would be embodied pots or boxes that appear to be chocolates, but when you actually got into them, turned out to be nothing more than coconut and condensed milk and cocoa powder, and were quite revolting and tasteless. "Or if you didn't gamble, you didn't do these things. You played Big L at the seaside. Fun game, a lot of pleasure. I'm still there today in the establishments around the coast of this country, hundreds of hundreds of bingo units. For many people, fairground bingo is still very much part and parcel of the British seaside experience and has remained virtually unchanged over the year."

"Oh yeah, we've also gone to Blackpool ever since we were born, you know. I'm only 21 now, like, you know, but no, we've come to Blackpool for years, and we've always come here into this little bingo quest. You pop your money in the slot, you get both your cards, and you're looking for a line down, across, diagonal, or one in each of your four corners. The caller calls the numbers. Actually, if you get a line, you add a pressure button, or you shout house. You can then save your vouchers for up for the bigger prizes, or you can just take a 1 win prize off the front of the store. A lot of football money bucks and a cupcake cupcake money box for my granddaughter. I've got these lollipops for the frying-pan because a banty other one. So I've got for Katy."

Bingo is in the blood. The tradition has passed down through her family. My grandparents were in the fairground business, traveling. Came to Cleveland to settle down and opened up amusement arcade and bingo, and my parents have worked there all my life, though as all I can remember. And then we came up to Blackpool and opened up up here in 1984, and we've been here ever since. Jimmy Thomas also descended from a fairground family, would go on to become one of the country's leading bingo operators. "I started in the bigger business about 70 years ago. I was eight years old, and I had a lovely job. I carried a basket of balls round a bingo. We see the customer takes a ball, threw it into a box where there were numbers, and that selected the numbers."

Bingo lingo had a particularly practical use when it came to fairground and seaside bingo. "When you're on a fairground, you're playing bingo, sometimes it wasn't very busy, and the important thing was the skill of the man on the microphone to entertain you, are not just calling numbers, you're a performer. And so you want to slow it down, but still not bore them, but slow it down enough for more people to congregate round, ready for the next game." Although extremely popular, the fairground bingo games were skirting around what was acceptable under British law back in the 1950s. "The fairground there always played for prizes, never for money. That's why, if you like, it was tolerated. We call it prize bingo. Fairgrounds went to a town for two weeks. Local authorities took the decision on how to handle gambling, and they said, 'This is acceptable. It's fun. Let's say over two weeks, it's a game of skill,' and so they let it go."

In any case, the powers that be were far more preoccupied with a different type of gambling. The big social scourge in that period was street begging. Everybody was worried about street betting. "We don't like men loitering on street corners, placing bets. We don't like the people leaving work to go and place bets. Every single work place had a bookies runner." So street betting needed sorting out. Up against the law, big changes were on the horizon. The Conservative government at the time proposed to legalize street betting after setting up a committee to investigate the state of gambling. When they were considering this new bill, they spent most of the time looking at street betting, about 80 odd hours, and they spent three hours looking at gaming, because the Home of his assured the MPs that were considering it that gaming would not be profitable. So bingo definitely was on top of the Conservatives' agenda when they decided to go ahead with the 1960 Betting and Gaming Act. But by passing the bill, they legalized commercial bingo for the very first time.

"Key of the door. 21." It allowed gambling in licensed clubs. With membership clubs, were allowed to charge people an entrance fee, and that's how they got their money. And then 90 percent of that went back in prizes, and 10 percent went to the government. The Tories' intention was to bring bingo, something they regarded as a benign pastime, under control. But unwittingly, they had unleashed a whirlwind. "By Jerry the third, you put the first pinger club, and by the end of January, you've got an explosion of being there clubs. The doors flew open, and bingo halls opened for business. Big business. Early 60s, the big noble was huge. Hundred thousand pounds a week is gambled in the big bingo club. Treasury did do a survey in 1963, during which I established there was thirteen million seven hundred and something thousand members of bingo clubs. So we're looking at a lot of bingo clubs." "Every day by 1966, 24% of the population was playing bingo. So that's almost a quarter of the population." "I bet you're excited about this, Arch." "I'm so excited, I could do with a drink of whiskey." "What is it?" "Forty seven. Forty seven." "Pounds to Ginny is you going to sit through to the last session?"

And again, if you could have foreseen just how quickly commercial bingo would take hurried. But while the government may have misjudged its potential, others most definitely happened. Just behind the scenes, a host of entrepreneurs had been waiting to cash in. Once the new law was passed, they were quick off the blocks, with one man in particular leading the pack. Eric Morley was really the central figure in explosive commercial bingo. Eric Morley was the driving force behind the Mecca organization. By the 1950s, the company was a big player in the booming post-war leisure market, and their empire included dance halls, ice rinks, bowling alleys, and picture houses.

But by the 1960s, the cinema industry was in trouble. In the last 10 years, box-office takings have been harmed, while the number of admissions has fallen even more. The number of cinemas open has followed the same pattern. Cinema had once played a significant role in people's lives. Many went to the pictures several times a week, but the rise of television had enticed people back into their homes. Suddenly, people were staying at home to watch Julie Andrews on television or somebody. They didn't go to the cinema. And with that collective experience gone, a big void had opened up, not just in people's lives, but in town centers up and down the country. And cinema after cinema closed. Cinema has very little use. It's a large shed in the middle of a town with nothing in it. This hit Mecca hard. Eric Morley, who'd run games in the army and who could see how big a draw it was in the holiday camps, knew that bingo was the answer. "You know, he was very astute. He knew what people wanted, and he had his finger on the pulse of popular taste. He knew because of Butlins that bingo was popular. He knew he'd got his buildings, and he put two and two together, and he made a very, very successful four out of it."

Molly was so convinced by the power of bingo that Mecca immediately started an aggressive expansion program, buying up empty cinemas all over the country at rock-bottom prices. But he wasn't the only one. The fairground families also seized the opportunity. "The children with their knowledge of bingo, they'd been playing it on the fairgrounds for a long time, and their benefi nests, their bit of skill entertaining, they're all weird or they were showmen. They enjoyed showing, and they could then take the cinema, put the bingo into it. I remember actually building prize bingo units inside the cinema from the fairground and actually building them up inside, and then building the bingo round it. So, you know, we moved in, and with that knowledge of that, a bit of finesse of entertaining, they made a success of turning cinemas into no holes, thousands of them."

In the monochrome world of early sixties Britain, the entrepreneurs managed to inject glamour back into the high street for ordinary people, and they topped off the appeal by adding special celebrity appearances to the mix. "Pat Feeny felt such a nose on Coronation Street and used to come regularly to the wig Knoll to present things for me." Something that had once been just a holiday pastime was now available every day of the week. But the game had changed. The days of cheap and cheerful prizes were gone. People were now playing for big money. With membership numbers rocketing, the clubs were able to offer ever more seductive prizes. They were glamorous places. The prizes were not just cash, surprises with a scientifical amorous. So we had mink stoles, we had cruises in the Mediterranean to Monte Carlo, for example, a beer, it's so these are holidays that you would see the Jet Set having at this time. The money prizes went up and up and up, and the bigger the cash prize, the bigger attraction to your premises, no question about it. Money was God, and therefore it dominated."

However, there was one casualty in this new world of high-stakes bingo. Lingo no longer had a place. Now, when you are playing for thousands of pounds, you can't make a mistake. So the number sin had to be called precisely, clearly, and correctly. So there was no argument that you had misled a number. "49 monotone number two." So if you like, money changed sick way. Bingo was pulled. It's now a commercial game. As soon as the game turned commercial, the comic calls disappeared, never to return to the big bingo halls. "I think one of the misconceptions about bingo and the bingo caller is that people joke about. Whereas what bingo players want is simply to hear the number very clearly, because that is crucial." But something of the language survived and continued to evolve in social clubs and seaside bingo.

"Top of the shop. 90 90." "We have bingo." "Seventh actually closed Sunday afternoon, once please." "Bingo has always been part and partial a life." "Wicked man's life on its own. No seven." "I used to call, 'Bring your numbers out, Doctor's Orders.' Marva nine. Legs eleven. That always gets a week loaded up on a glass." "Those wonderful ladies. Hello. Thank you. Muslims then anyway." "Out 69. 69 half where they are." "Four and five. Forty five. Shut that door." "Number four. Dinky doo." "Number two. Deck of cards. Fifty-two." "All the threes. Dirty V." "Kelly's eye. That's all wrong." "Five and nine. The poison nine." "Today there remains so deeply embedded in popular culture that it would be impossible to grow up in Britain and not know a single dingo pool." "Getting plenty. Number 20." "The same."

Modernizing forces that ditched the traditional calls in the sixties were also at work, taking the game in other new commercial directions. As more and more people were getting on board. "Forum 141. Finger trains and absolutely also phenomena." Obviously, excursions were popular in the 1960s, both by coach and by train, but bingo trains really caught the public imagination. The numbers were called, announced, damnit, a noise system, and you had people wandering up and down. So basically, if everybody shouted house, it was a person in each carriage who could check the numbers and make sure that, and they would go, for example, from London to Brighton, London to Margate, Manchester to Blackpool, era where those seaside resort basically had a population to take them to it. "2 and 8. 28."

The bingo explosion was not only a big money spinner for the main operators, it was also good news for a small sundaland printing firm which produced the all-important bingo cards. "The sixties were massive period for us. We went from a cross shaft dating stuff at the beginning the 60s to the end of the 60s be in the 70s, around 500. So we really, really grow. We were starting to print bingo and exactly the time when commercial bingo became legal, and we were one of effectively two major companies that were able to grow from that. All the collation was all done by hand, and the speed of people's hands and the work they had to do, and the volumes that we were delivering were massive."

One of the reasons bingo took off as it did was because it was able to target the growing proportion of the population for whom the 60s were bringing new possibilities in the form of greater spending power. In 1962, The Guardian newspaper declared that a housewife's revolution had occurred after a government report had found that one in three married women were now working outside the home. Women had with discretionary income that they could spend. Now they had already found in liked gambling on bingo when they went on holidays. "And look at this, we've got a finger place opening up right in the center of town. It's open in the afternoons. I've done my shift in the morning because a lot of women only work part-time. I can pop down the bingo for the afternoon before I got it children from school at 4 o'clock. Often they go from work to home, change, and then go to bingo." "2/3 for the pink flame."

"Those days were women. Nobody knows how many bingo players there are, but it's not less than 6 million, and probably near a 10. Most of them are women. Most of them are regular. Many spend 5 pounds a week on the game. For them, the bingo session takes the place of both the music hall and the church." Women were also beginning to say, "Why can't I go out and have a bit time on my own? You know, a lot of men, it's quite acceptable for them to go out to a football match, to go fishing, you know, do whatever, whereas women were perhaps beginning to be a bit assertive in saying, 'Well, what about me?'" "Think your walls forget. Probably the only safe environment for a woman to go on her own. She could go there without a companied by a man, accompanied by another woman, and she felt totally safe. The husband was happy to give her a couple of quid to go with, because he knew she was in a total safe environment. She got nobody can in drunken chatting her up, put it crudely, you know, there was nothing like that in a bingo hall."

"We sort of forget just how unliberated women were. Yes, my husband's the boss, and I have seven sons. No, like them to take after their father, because he's the boss. I mean, I have to ask his consent if I can go out to see friends. Oh, you know, women didn't go into pubs. They did have to get permission to go out without their husbands. They did have to prioritize the childcare. Opportunities were very limited. Even now, some women won't feel comfortable walking into a pub on their own, whereas you can go to a bingo club on your own, and it's possibly, I can't think of many places where women would feel comfortable going on their own." "I used to go every Sunday night. I used to leave the kids at home with my husband. Yeah, that was my escapism, really."

"I like come in because it's somewhere you can come on your own. Like if you go in a pop, and you're a woman, and you're on your own, and it's just you, you just don't do it. Where you can call me be there with someone, with friends, be your corner, or on your mom box. So, yeah, and no man want to come as though it's really good. It's a great day out. It's a social day out, you know, you go there and you meet a lot of friends. I'm a single girl, so I love to go because I've got a lot of friends there, and they care for you. It's a Karen place."

But the sight of thousands of women queuing up for a flutter at bingo was more than many could bear. Back in the sixties, almost as soon as the boom began, so too did the backlash. Some newspapers started denouncing bingo as a new and dangerous phenomenon, and columnists gleefully declared the birth of bingo orphans. "We have in a times an editorial that headlined this [ __ ] F pastime. We have condemnation of the players, a stupid, naive, ignorant." "Ever gambled away all that I was giving money? No, certain." You know, there were stories about women supposedly frittering away their housekeeping money. There were stories about women in electing their children, and some of that was the kind of thing that is often leveled women anyway. The press reactions, you would expect them to. It was something they could sell papers on. They find one child, so that kind of bingo hall, they could have him on the front page. The fact the child was just passing the bingo hall didn't really matter.

The disdain wasn't just reserved for women. Bingo in general became a target of chattering class. "Gone bingo, the most mindless ritual achieved in half a million years of human evolution." "There is a lot of snobbery around, and qualitative hypocrisy, and the usual elitism around anything that working-class people enjoy." "Twice a week. That's every week. That's every week. How much money do you spend here on the average?" "About thirty Bob." "Have you got any children at um, or married?" "So you know, how many problems?" "No family problems." "Wouldn't you rather be doing something else, such as I'll say, I'm an evening like this, walking, you know, whether it's greyhound racing or going out to the pub, what the working men's club?" Those sorts of activities are seen as less educational, they're less favored.

The Theatre Royal Margate, a fine 200-year-old house, the second oldest theater in the country. But the two I found outside wasn't waiting to see the play, they were waiting to play bingo. "Mr. Brown, are the bingo separate?" "Are much?" "Well, they're not at the moment, but we're hoping during the winter period when audiences are know that they will." "This is a very old theater. Do you think this is a very dignified way of helping it?" "Well, it's not a dignified way, but it's a means to an end, isn't that a danger that it might turn into a bingo parlor rather than a theater?" "How does your regular company feel about it?" "Well, we have a member of the company here, Susan. That she would probably tell you more than I can do." "Miss Matthew, Susan, you work in the box office, don't you this afternoon?" "Yes." "How do the actors feel about this bingo business?" "Well, we don't. These posters put all around our beautiful old theater, and begin with, we didn't like it at all. About taking the long view, if it means that we can have 12 months work instead of just a seasonal, seasonal period, then we're for it."

Susan wasn't alone. Many at the time felt that bingo was a threat to the world as they knew it. But for others, bingo was a welcome arrival to their world. Working-class life was changing, with old patterns of living coming under threat. For whole generations, rows of terraced houses were being demolished to make way for new estates, and whilst this often improved the material quality of people's lives, the sense of community was faltering. Whole streets were being restructured. "The life that the street was very much changing. People were beginning to live in high-rise blocks of flats. Women would still go to it to the wash house in the 1950s and 60s to do their laundry. A lot of those spaces were going. So the idea of having a communal life outside of the house, and remember that, you know, a lot of houses were not places that people actually socialize them. We've got this myth pathology really about working-class life, that people are always popping out of each other's houses. That wasn't really the case. So to have a place that people could go out to and have a kind of non-intimate sociability, to be out with you mates doing an activity together, [ __ ] I really fulfilled that. So for the ordinary working people of this country, it was a godsend."

"The cinnamons is close. They needed a community action. They would sitting at home every night and talking to their neighbor. They wanted somewhere to go to meet their friends and have a night out, and the be no war became the place: cheap, easy, friendly, great community atmosphere. We've met people here in the last couple of sessions than we've met literature and our peers. We can guarantee satisfaction. You get out of this." "Give me a couple of beers there." "How much do you spend?" "Twelve and six on the night." "That all you think that's worth it for what you get?" "Well, I've been a few times, and I got 23 pounds one shilling, so my expenses of period."

"For older women, there was that, that need, I guess, for sociability, you know, to avoid loneliness. A lot of older women, in particular, live on their own, and in many ways, bingo was simply a way to get out of the house. And that's also why bingo sessions during the day are very popular. A lot of elderly people don't want to come out in evenings." "Every Wednesday, about court pass, half past twelve, I come round, open the hole, and then feel the errands. We water ready, and I've it hot for when the players come in about 1 o'clock ish, so they can all have a hot cuppa tea if they wish. And then I do another guilty, which is taking their entrance fees of 50p. Our basic out bridge is about thirty to thirty-two every week. Sometimes it goes up to about thirty-eight, which is a good week. But I get excited when it gets past twenty-five because it covers all the expenses and gives us a little profit, which is all going into the truth furnace."

"It's an escape from the boredom of life. They come for the companionship, somewhere to go, somewhere to get over those little blocks of flats or apartments, sometimes a slight break away from the family. And then they're all talking in over from table to table and amongst themselves, and probably sometimes they wouldn't say two or three words right throughout the week to anyone else. But it's amazing how there's a jolly friendly atmosphere. It's the company. You meet people. They probably wouldn't have anybody to talk to. It's nice. Unfortunately, yeah, not building new people on their own. They don't have anybody to talk to, and when they do get chance, well, like me, have stopped."

Bingo is now a staple of many church halls, but back in the sixties, it was closely associated with other forms of gaming and helped trigger a wide and moral panic about the extent of gambling in the UK. "Nation fiddling while the Treaty of Rome burns, but the Sabbath contrasts are too spectacular for comfort in this Christian nation. Only one person in 10 goes to church. God who made us mighty no longer makes us mightier yet." Since the 1960 legislation liberalizing betting and gaming, many now believe that Britain had become a nation of gamblers. "Britain was actually the destination of choice for anybody who wanted to gamble because there was more opportunity to gamble within the UK than anywhere else in the world. So thus far towns of Europe were put in a shade by London. You know, if you wanted to come and gamble from America, then this was a place to be, and there was an awful lot of gambling tourism actually in that period, but mainly for the high-class casinos."

Some church groups were particularly unhappy about the rapid spread of gambling. "There's a lot of religious opposition. There's bodies that are opposed to gamble in the nationality gambling league. This is this great outrage against basically two or three things. One is that, in fact, it's a waste of money, causes poverty. Secondly, it corrupts children and women, women and children. And thirdly, the third wheel objection is it creates an attitude of getting somewhat for nothing, some from out. And those are the three driving forces behind trying to stop people gambling."

But the Catholics didn't have a problem with bingo. Instead, they saw it as an opportunity made in heaven. "67." In the post-war years, there had been a huge influx of workers from Ireland to help rebuild the country. The Catholic Church needed money to pay for the building of new schools and social clubs to cater for them. Bingo provided an important income. "It is said to have partly paid for the building that's become affectionately known as Paddy's wigwam." "They have been started before the war and to a very different, different plan, but of course, money was much tighter after the world. Building materials were rationed, so they had to have a new scheme, and they had to have a massive fundraising effort alongside the new scheme. So the Metropolitan Cathedral decided, well, if we're going to raise that for the money quickly, you know, bingo games is one very good way forward. We will have bingo games, and and they did, and very successfully too, because they raised a lot of money, and it's a very beautiful testament to the use of gambling money, I think, as well."

Even though bingo was doing positive things for a Catholic Church, political changes afoot in 1964 suddenly spelled an uncertain future for the commercial operators of the game. When Harold Wilson's Labour government came into power, it could see that things had got out of hand. "Control was not really in place. I had five casinos, small ones, because I manufacture the equipment, I could put them in a club, became a casino, and tell you open good casinos. Back to see no too many of them, uncontrolled. You could open anywhere, and you bison are, you opened it. It was freedom. When they're on control, you sometimes get about element in them, and bingo was virtually uncontrolled."

"Up to tricks. 46." A few unscrupulous bingo halls were operating some sharp practices. "I still think the vast majority of bingo that was painful, it was safe, and what was done with the best intention. Certainly might be one or two at best, but people were making so much money legitimately anyway, there wasn't much need to I cheat the system. But the world wanted to cheat. You know, you've got a cooler reading out a different number from the ball. Number four, they pull it ball than the ball might have number 300. Read number 17 because they wanted not ticket to win, and they put have a list of numbers."

But the attractiveness of bingo had caught the attention of a far more dangerous eternity. "Bingo, I think, was constituted during this period was a very, very good way of laundering money because bingo players played cash. There wasn't a record kept of how many people came in or how many cards you sold. If you run a large cash prize at bingo, or even had a large amount of money that you wanted to put in the back, you could say, 'Well, I wanted to bingo.' There was no check to say you didn't win it at bingo. So, you know, there was nothing to stop you putting the proceeds of a heist in the bank under the guise that it was a bingo."

"In this report shows that bingo club have a membership of fourteen and a half million members. 15:05 closed on a million, and that every year, one-armed bandit make a profit of around ten million pound." One of the most lucrative opportunities for the organized crime gangs were the slot machines that were situated inside the bingo halls. "It was always a risk with the gaming machines that although they were run by family businesses in this country, of the foreign element creeping in because of the weakness of the gambling acts. So we have got a potential problem though, where we were playing with machines that were pre-war, most of them, but the brand-new machines were coming in, and the companies behind them were not the best of the syndicates in America get involved, what you call them, but they then the ship them over under their own banner and brought in their own people. They saw England as an easy touch, and they thought they could move in and take over the gambling business."

"The gaming industry is a fast-moving industry with a lot of money, and perhaps hot money involved with a fringe of criminal element with certain dangers of a social nature." Fearing a mafia-style takeover, the Labour government was determined to tighten the rules and crackdown on commercial gaming. "They actually meant it was going to end. It was going to be nothing left." Bingo was seen as much a part of the gaming world as casinos. So Eric Morley and the other operators knew they had to lobby government to save their profitable industry. "And it was up to us, the guards explained to government that bingo was not hard gambling that took away the people's livelihood. Bingo was soft and fun, and we had to explain this and persuade politicians there was a total barrier between the two."

They were successful because when Labour passed the Gaming Act in 1968, the casino industry was decimated and went from two thousand clubs to a hundred and twenty-one. But bingo came out of it relatively unscathed. "The National Association of Bingo Clubs has come along with us in recognizing that if bingo is to be this social game played, as I say, between neighbors for modest stakes, then we must have rules which ensure that it doesn't become a source of of regret and sorrow and hardship. People want to go there and enjoy themselves and not feel that they've lost more money than they can afford. So they softened for bingo because we persuaded them with evidence that bingo was a soft community game played by ordinary people."

Some controls were tightened up, and licenses became harder to come by, but the way was clear for the next decade. Over 8 million people, mainly housewives and pensioners, played bingo perhaps once or twice a week. They wagered on their clickety clicks and their Kelly's eyes, an incredible 185 million pounds a-year. The promoters called this obsession an entertainment with a flutter. Certainly, it fills lonely hours for the elderly, but folk also want to win, perhaps a few pounds only, or maybe up to a thousand. And soon, such amounts would pale into insignificance.

The British tabloids that at once so derided bingo now wanted a slice of the action. "Fleet street's first bingo millionaire phoned in his full house claim this morning." They ran their own games and offered prize money that people previously could only have dreamt of. It began with The Daily Star, was quickly followed by The Sun, and soon after, most of the rest of Fleet Street smashed circulation papers joined in. Millions of pounds are being offered in prizes in the biggest circulation war. "Fleet street's first bingo millionaire phoned in his full house claim this morning." They ran their own games and offered prize money that people previously could only have dreamt of. It began with The Daily Star, was quickly followed by The Sun, and soon after, most of the rest of Fleet Street smashed circulation papers joined in. Millions of pounds are being offered in prizes in the biggest circulation war. "Fleet street's first bingo millionaire phoned in his full house claim this morning." They ran their own games and offered prize money that people previously could only have dreamt of. It began with The Daily Star, was quickly followed by The Sun, and soon after, most of the rest of Fleet Street smashed circulation papers joined in. Millions of pounds are being offered in prizes in the biggest circulation war. "We used to print the den express, Bing Gardens, any startup bingo in the mirror, and massive numbers. We were doing five million, six million run, and it's boom. We were having many millions of players playing bingo all in newspapers every day. We were having play rates for the national papers were about 30 percent. Now, what that means is we would drop in bigger tickets to every home in the country, and 30% of those tickets were being played. Huge, absolutely huge." "The Sun newspaper claims that bingo has added half a million to its sales, proving a more potent circulation booster than it's more familiar attraction." "Yes, it is cost-effective, and hopefully, we will also kill off some of our rivals in the process." "Do you really think it is going to end like that? Is this a battle to the death, as you described it?" "It is a battle to the death, and our rivals are really feeling the pain." "So what do you think this means for the future of some newspapers in Fleet Street?" "Well, I hope it means that some of our rivals are put out of business."

Even the broadsheets wanted in on the game. "It's a cross between the football pools and bingo, as befits the Times image. You get an upmarket plastic card the size of a credit card. The game is based on the absent downs of the stock market." "But he came for people at the Times and The Telegraph from wherever they're at the time were variations on bingo. Yeah, wasn't bingo, he was either how a stock market moved to or years of wine, but it was still bingo." "It does smack slightly, even upmarket bingo." "Well, if we're selling four million copies of the Times by this time next week, I would agree with us."

The newspaper industry was delighted with the results, but traditional bingo operators weren't quite so enamored. "It isn't bingo, it's a lottery. They draw so many numbers a day. You've got to buy the newspaper for a week. It's a sales gimmick to sell newspapers. They could play for big money because it's an advertising gimmick, but it's not bigger. There's no community atmosphere, there's no pleasure. If purely a gamble." The bingo clubs were worried momentum in the hall seemed to be slowing down, overshadowed by the newspaper bingo millionaires. They needed to bring the bus back. Bingo was going to be left in the doldrums.

"We had the idea of the National Game Bigger Association and thought up this game. They wanted to link up all the bingo clubs in the UK and consolidate ticket sales to create a massive prize fund. We went to croc through Parliament, we pleaded with government. The Gaming Board threw up their objections. It was a whole second that I was that was heard. I remember it well, and he said, 'Now let the gate, let the bingo hall talk.' He likes it, and he listened to the reasons, the sense, the logic of it, and says, 'This is great. These people have to compete. The people playing bigger have to have something to go for, a big prize.'"

In 1986, the National Game was born. "I think people thought that we were serious, linking up 800 bingo clubs, national game by computer, and really, it wasn't the technology. It was all new technology." Computer-generated bingo tickets were sold in halls all over the country. A random generator selected that night's numbers, which were then transmitted across the network to all participating clubs. "This computer could take in and analyze all the tickets that were sold, know what was number to call, and could check the winners and could control perfectly the running of this huge game with hundreds of thousands of tickets being sold from Scotland to lands in put all the numbers are in now."

"Iced down national game. Full house only. And now your prize money went huge. Two hundred and fifty, five hundred thousand pounds. Big money in those days. You suddenly you had a legalized massive jackpot where you might get 80 or hundred grand for a single game of bingo, and it was just a WoW. Every night you got close, and you had an equal chance of winning it as everybody else in the land playing that game. So it was a very popular game, and it brought the spark back."

One of the unique attractions of bingo is that it is not strictly a win-lose situation. The enjoyment of playing can be almost as much fun as the winning. "If they enjoy the thrill of nearly winning, they enjoy the actual real. So when they do win, and they do enjoy seeing their friends as well, while they're down there, they like through the group. You know, you're not sitting there to chatter, you're sitting there to play bingo." "For everybody that one, there's at least 50 people nearly winning, and the excitement was how close you got to winning. So that was a thrill of bingo when you're one number is the next number. Yeah, next number that come on. I can live with that. But when it's the next number, oh my god, my heart goes in my stomach. Couldn't you just missed it? And so got Lina German and going, got excitement going, got the pleasure of it. People in the town, and it won't come, and I call it sample bang."

"If you have a win, you're delighted. If you don't, well, say, but try again next week." "Before each 100. Join, join a new form. Before we can." "It's lovely." "And when they won ecstasy, they made it 20 before." "Still waiting for the big win. Definitely want a pound. I've won a thousand. Didn't really matter. They'd yell just as loud. They jump in their seats just as I bingo, I've won. It might only be for pound, but you've won. It's just, I, I don't know. It gives you a thrill. Well, it gives me a trial anyway. When I'm winning money here, I come in next day and spend a certain part of it and go to me bar and get me two bottles of what nice Guinness." "People will go and say to you, I don't go to when I go for the pleasure. I think the Fibby. I think everybody wants to win, whether it's big no or ever you do in life, you want to win."

The National Game had brought bingo into the modern era, but the converted cinemas that had once provided glamour now looked shabby and out of step with the way people were living. As the people became more used to travelling in cars, "You open bingo halls. We've got the biggest carpark. Cricklewood is a total success because it had car parking for 1800 cars." "Who are now creating the Lord's? We know halls, a thousand seater, two thousand seater. People were more demanding now. They were asking for better facilities." "You've moved to much more I mapped about market buildings. Are they designed for bingo? We could develop a big with entertainment round the outer core. We could put a pub, a restaurant, theater, all these things around inside the huge shell that then put us a couple of thousand seats in the middle of it." So they became the next generation of bingo halls. "This is great, didn't it? Yeah. Everything matches. No big. Yeah."

Big prize money and the new super-sized, specially-designed halls seemed to have created a bright 21st-century future for bingo. But then something came along that had the potential to extinguish this favorite British pastime for good. In 2006, the Scottish Assembly introduced a smoking ban, and the rest of Britain followed suit a year later. "Smoking is a very important thing to bring no players. Sixty-five, seventy percent of people in bingo all smoked. So nervous reaction when you're playing, you enjoy to smoke as a part of that pleasure. A higher proportion of working-class people smoked, been bingo as a working-class came. A bingo is also, it came for people who take risks, allocations. So when the smoking ban came in, he hit bingo harder proportionately than other pastimes. We'd reckoned that that would take fifteen percent away from the bottom line income of a bingo hall. For a lot of big no holes, that meant closure."

"Had to close. We shot this in May of last year. We used to have on a regular basis over a thousand people playing in any evening at the real bingo club." "Nobody could deny it's a more pleasant place to be in the bingo hall now. Treena tidy air. There's not that the stink of tobacco. You're talking to a nonsmoker. So I'm probably biased, but but it did hurt my business, and I heard bingo business, and we haven't fully recovered from that."

Well, over time, it adapted. By 2010, there were nearly thirty million less players a year compared to 2006, but it still meant that around forty-eight million people were playing annually. Bingo is once again having to reinvent itself, this time for the smoke-free 21st century, designing new clubs with something for everyone. Bingo still has its fan base within the UK, and it's quite an expensive one. The game is trying to reinvent itself. It's targeting student nights out and hen nights, and it appears to be working. Today, the biggest growth area in membership is women under 35. "Got the lounge. It's just good atmosphere."

Bingo's success in attracting a new clientele has been helped by the creation of separate spaces for those who want to socialize without disturbing the more hardcore player. "Everyone seems, everyone seems to think it's also like grandmas and stuff, and it's really not. It's really good fun, and you get to have a drink and a laugh, and because you got there like the loud room and the quiet room, you can sit in the loud room with your girlfriends and have a bit of a chit chat and have fun, you know."

"The business is always difficult. I think ping goes on an upturn now. There's still, you know, millions of people play the game now. I remember people saying, you know, 25, 30 year ago, or bingo won't last. You know, it's still very strong these days. I don't think personally that will be a time when bingo isn't popular." "Merely their 89th."

The bingo business has managed to survive because at the heart of it is a simple game that we fell in love with a long time ago, and its appeal today is much the same as it has always been. It's an egalitarian game, beautifully without pretense, that's kept us entertained through difficult times, injected a touch of glamour to the high street, and brought people together. "Made the most of friends. Others where we. I mean, I didn't know until I came to being going, and then when this opens, just came on a Friday, and it does play an important social function. I think it is important that that does continue."

"One in 7. 17." "I was sat with people 90 years old, sharp as needles. One of their daughters said to me, 'My mother was going into a home. Since she started playing bingo, a mind it's fresher game, and that's what bingo does. It makes you work a brain.'" And there's always that chance that you might just get a full house. But whether you win or not, bingo is more than just a game for many. It's part of who they are. "I don't want people crying at my funeral. I said, what I want is, as you walk in, you're handed a strip of bingo tickets, and I want the priest to call the bingo numbers so we can all have a game of bingo." "How can you lose? The light so much brighter there. You can't forget all your troubles, forget all your cares."