Into the ForgeAs a complete bingo novice, we though it would be fun to send Ed Hawkins to the biggest bingo hall in Britain – the Forge Mecca in Glasgow – with entertaining results. Turns out bingo isn’t quite as easy as Ed had believed it to be
Between 1960 and 1985 the Church of England was reduced to almost half its previous size. The swinging sixties, free love, The Beatles, women’s lib and, a little later, Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader could all share a proportion of responsibility.
I ‘blame’ bingo. There has been much hand-wringing and pontificating – hefty volumes have been written – about the decline in religion during that period but none picked up on the apparent preference for folks to set eyes down to a bingo card rather than their feet in some damp church.
Consider this: by 1963, when the rot had set in for the bible bashers, the bingo industry boasted more than 14m members and three years later a Gallup poll reported that almost a quarter of the country had enjoyed the game in the previous 12 months. The church was losing an average of 30,000 supporters a year while bingo boomed. Paradoxically – you’ll like this bit – while people lost faith in a supreme being, there was a rise in the numbers of those who started to believe in lucky charms and the unfortunate properties of number 13.
Bingo, or ‘Housey-Housey’ as it was back then, was blindingly glitzy. The likes of Cilla Black, Diana Dors and Tommy Steele would mingle with the punters at the local hall, listening intently for the numbers to be called by a man in a sparkly jacket with a penchant for sexual innuendo: 18 – coming of age, 43 – down on your knees, 56 – was she worth it? – a call said to have derived from the cost of a lady of the night in Portsmouth.
I didn’t expect much glam when I arrived at the Forge Mecca bingo hall in Parkhead, a long punt downfield from the Celtic football stadium, on a freezing December night. It had earned the “luckiest hall in Britain” tag thanks to two £1m jackpot winners. At 2,500 seats it was also the biggest. You can’t be one without the other. Both winners had occurred within weeks of each other in September 2007.
I aimed to become No 3 although the surroundings were hardly inspirational. From the outside it was everything the 60s were not. A charmless identikit building from every retail park you have ever seen. It could have been a DIY store or electrical outlet. Cilla Black? Jimmy Crankie wouldn’t be seen dead here.
Alistair Steel, the manager, greeted me. He was surprisingly young and reassuringly Scottish. “Ah’ve had a burst water pipe today, four or five inches a water, tiles falling off ... it’s been absolute murr-duh.”
We went up to his office to talk. An empty packet of Walker’s crisps and a can of Irn Bru lay on the desk. I could make out the faint calls below of a game in progress. “Number seven ... on its own ... number seven.” It became apparent that my chances of a £1m win had been dashed when he told me that I was only the 74th person to venture out on such a bitter night. With bingo winnings inextricably linked to the number of players Alistair told me the most I could hope for was “a hundred quid”.
Perhaps I should have stayed at home to play online. Rank, who own the Mecca chain, and Gala have been closing unprofitable clubs over the past few years with the online business blamed. According to bingocafe.co.uk, however, they estimate the number of online players at 50,000 in the UK. A questionable figure given global bingo yield was expected to double in four years to $1 billion by 2010. The introduction of the smoking ban in 2007 and the rise of tax from 19% to 22% have also hit hard.
“I think online has some sort of impact,” said Alistair, who has been working in bingo for 13 years. “Not a huge one. I think it’s mainly when the weather’s really bad it gives the customer a choice. We’ve got a lot who play both, they’ll come here and then maybe go home and sit and play for a couple of hours. They come in and tell you their stories ‘I was online all night and won whatever’.
“We know there are customers that do it so we try to get a bit of crossover. So on a lot of our company promotions we hand out vouchers, maybe £10 off to play online. From speaking to the web guys they’re trying to get people who play online into the halls, wine and dine them, just to give them something different from the computer. It hasn’t impacted here a huge amount, probably less than one per cent.”
I pressed him for details of the two jackpot winners. Margaret Shearer, who claimed she knew something big would happen because she’d had a hot flush, became Britain’s first bingo millionaire. She carried a miniature Buddha in her handbag and her regular partner was her mum, whose surname was Money.
“She still plays,” said Alistair.
“Is she here tonight?”
“No.”
The second millionaire was Jean McCullagh. Hers was a depressing story. Almost immediately upon receiving the loot, she became involved in a legal battle with her sisters-in-law, who claimed she had promised to share any winnings.
“Not sure they still come,” said Alistair. “I know one out of the three who was disputing it has died now, but, erm, the other two I don’t think they talk right enough.”
We moved on to discuss the general workings of the club, which provided an interesting character profile of the bingo player. “They like their prize money, they like things for free and they like you to know it. To get people in during the cold weather we’ve offered free chips, free chips ‘n gravy, free chips ‘n curry. Oh, and free tea.
“They’re never happy with the prizes on offer. You’ll be about to announce that night’s winnings and before you’ve even had a chance to tell ‘em, they’ve shouted ‘get the money up!’”
Armed with a rather fetching pink dabber to cancel out my numbers, I was soon in position in the hall to, hopefully, win a jackpot that would pay for my train fare. Alistair started to explain the ‘rules’ but I wasn’t listening. I mean, how hard can it be? The caller shouts out the numbers, you dab them out on your card. I was focusing on my fellow players. The majority seemed not long for this world. Their number would soon be up. I fancied that sharper reflexes and hearing had to give me a better chance.
I was hopeless. I couldn’t find the numbers quick enough. By the time I had dabbed one, the caller was two ahead by which time I was fretting over whether this was the first sign of some sort of degenerative brain disorder. I was a disaster at bingo, a game so mundane that professional morons like Kerry Katona, a bastion of ignorance, claimed to enjoy and succeed at.
The look on my face as I vainly searched for the correct digits was the same your senile grandma has when, increasingly desperate, she cries, “Where’s Millie the cat ... I can’t see her ... I’ve lost her ... I...” before a relative chirps in with, “Grandma, Millie died a long time ago, remember?” In this instance, the ‘relative’ was Alistair. “Er, Ed? The numbers are ordered by rows – singles, teens, twenties, thirties and so on. It’s quite simple, yeah?”
Yes, it was quite simple. With the knowledge absorbed and my tongue lolling out of the corner of my mouth, I punched off the numbers with increasing ferocity. I was away. There was the occasional grunt of triumph too, as I nailed another number with the hearing of a barn owl. Faster and faster I seemed to progress, spending the seconds in between calls muttering ‘give-it-to-me-give-it-to-me’, and just as glory was upon me with only two numbers remaining for ‘house’, some small, ancient ball of knitwear in the corner would let out a meek “meh”. That’s not even a shout of house for Christ’s sake! She should be disqualified! It was just vowels! Alistair, officiate here!
Then a new round would start and once more I would be engrossed. I was smashing the dabber into the table now. The grunts were getting louder. More aggressive. Real lowest common denominator stuff. In between calls I now took to eyeing the other players, pointing at them with my dabber while mouthing ‘this is my game now – the new breed’s in town’ and ‘time’s up grandma!’ And, disturbingly, imagining jabbing the dabber on the forehead of a previous foe to leave a perfect pink circle.
I had, of course, taken things too far and failed to realise that the whole point of bingo is that no matter who you are, or what super powers you might think you have in relation to the others in the room, you cannot possibly improve your chances of victory. In that regard bingo is rather a cruel form of wagering because you believe the opposite. Whereas with a football bet or horse punt you can see with your own eyes that the game is up when your team is 2-0 down or your nag has been put to sleep a few furlongs from home, with bingo you always think you are on the cusp of triumph only for it to be snatched away from you by someone smelling of wee. There’s a moral in there somewhere.
So I didn’t become a millionaire. Nor even a hundredaire (is that a word?). The final ignominy was left for the caller to deliver, who wandered over after the final number. “I saw you were struggling at first,” said LeighAnne, “so I slowed down for you.” |
