Eyes Down! The Story of Bingo Timeshift

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.

-Bingo!

It was a game that anyone could play and it was sweeping the nation.

It made pulses race.

-You get terribly excited each game, do you?

-Ooh, I'm very excited, yes.

Some people couldn't get enough.

I'm so excited, I could do with a drink of whisky.

-What is it? £47...?

-£47, two shilling.

Bingo allowed somebody to come home with 100, £200 in their pocket,

which is beyond believable cos in those days, £200 was a lot of money.

The prizes were not just cash. The prizes were designed to be glamorous.

So we had cruises in the Mediterranean,

to Monte Carlo and Biarritz.

Whether they won or not,

bingo had the power to keep them coming back for more.

-Did you win this afternoon?

-I did, yes, twice.

Did you enjoy the session?

-Very much, thank you.

-Did you win?

-Yes, ten shillings.

The boom seemed to arrive out of nowhere,

but it packed out cinemas and theatres across the land,

much to the delight of a new breed of entrepreneur.

A bingo hall became THE place.

Cheap, easy, friendly.

They felt they were somebody.

But not everyone was amused.

Well, we don't like these posters put all around our beautiful old theatre.

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 liberalising 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 had created the perfect storm

for a bingo bonanza.

BINGO CALLER: Eyes down, full house.

Time for fun! 41!

House!

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.

It's fantastic. Adrenaline rush.

You know? Are you filming me?

Well, when we get nearly a line, your heart... My heart starts going,

and you think, "Oh, come on!

"Pull it out, pull it out!" You know, really excited.

Oh, it's nervous, you're shaking, the adrenaline's going.

Yeah, we've had that quite a bit tonight, haven't we?

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 Housey-housey,

Lotto or Tombola.

BINGO CALLER: At 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.

ARCHIVE: Jack indulges in the one gambling game permitted in the Navy -

Tombola.

It was a very easy form of entertainment.

You didn't need to carry a lot of apparatus,

you didn't need to carry a big peak clientele to operate it.

The Army could carry it in a briefcase, all with cards.

They called it Housey-housey or Lotto,

and the Army could take it all over the world.

And they played it on the desert, they played it in the jungle.

It was something they could do anywhere.

It took the mind of the person away from what was happening in the world

because once you start playing bingo, you concentrate.

BINGO CALLER: Eyes down for the full house. Two ducks, 22.

It was in the Forces where an important aspect

of the game that we're all familiar with,

whether we've played bingo or not, has its roots.

BINGO CALLER: Number nine, straight line!

The calls initially came from the Army and the Navy.

All the fours, droopy drawers.

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, and it was "two fat WACs".

Well, a WAC was a lady...in the Army,

and there were often the jokes

about them being very bonny in the uniforms,

and so we'd say "two fat WACs".

And so, yeah, the calls do reflect

the rather coarse humour of groups of men cooped up together.

BINGO CALLER: Legs, 11!

I like seven and six!

BINGO CALLER: Was she worth it? Seven and six.

I've heard several versions of this one

from various elderly gentlemen in various Royal Naval clubs

and Royal British Legion clubs, so seven and six, was she worth it?

Some of them say it was the price of a marriage licence

and the call-back, especially if your wife is next to you,

is "of course she is!" or "she's still here! We're still together."

So the people call back with that.

Another one, another explanation that I've heard as well,

if two of you are going out,

if you've picked up a nice girl to take out,

then you want two and six for two cinema tickets,

cos they're one and three each,

you want two and six for two nice fish-and-chip suppers

and two and six for bed and breakfast.

And I don't know how true that is,

but I've had that one also told me several times.

This ingenuity and injection of humour 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 knobbly-knees competition

and beauty contests.

One of the main entertainments at the holiday camps was Tombola.

Now, this is not a secondary or subsidiary activity.

For example, marquees were put up 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.

Hello, everyone! This is Beryl, your Radio Butlin announcer.

I did go to Pontins near Morecambe,

and honestly, it was just like...

..a prisoner-of-war camp, really.

Nobody around,

then somebody announced,

"There'll be bingo in the hall in five minutes!"

And everybody de-pouches from their rooms to the hall!

If your idea of a good holiday is bingo from 10.30 in the morning

until 10.30 at night, then Clacton is a dream come true.

Every day, including Sundays, the faithful are called to play.

The holiday 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 donating £50,000 a year

from its Tombola games to charity in the 1950s.

# Bingo! Bingo! I'm in love! #

It was very popular there.

It was also popular at seaside resorts and fairgrounds.

We have some lovely accounts

of some Tombola games being good games at travelling fairgrounds,

where the prizes would be Bargee 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 tasted of sawdust.

# Till she was sweet, my key of the door

# And now we're hand in glove Bingo... #

Even if you didn't gamble, you didn't do these things,

you played bingo at the seaside.

The fun game, a lot of pleasure, and it's still there today

in the establishments around the coasts of this country.

Hundreds and 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 years.

Ah, yeah, we've all's come to Blackpool ever since we were born.

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 place.

BINGO CALLER: White six and seven, 67.

White seven and nine, 79.

Right, you pop your money in the slot, you get both your cards.

Are you looking for a line down, across, diagonal

or one in each of your four corners?

The caller calls the numbers.

If you get a line, you either press your button or you shout "house".

You can then save your vouchers up for the bigger prizes

or you can just take a one-win prize off the front of the stall.

I've got a football money-box.

And a cupcake...

Cupcake money-box.

For my granddaughter I've got these lollipops.

And a frying-pan because I burnt the other one! So I've got this...

For Katie, bingo is in the blood.

The tradition has passed down through her family.

My grandparents were in the fairground business travelling,

came to Cleveleys to settle down,

and opened up amusement arcade and bingo.

And my parents have worked there all my life, though.

That's all I can remember.

And then we came up to Blackpool and opened 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 bingo 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...

..which the customer takes the 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 were on a fairground and you were playing bingo,

sometimes it wasn't very busy.

And the important thing was the skill of the man on the microphone

to entertain.

You were not just calling numbers, you were a performer.

And so you wanted 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.

Two seats this side. Two seats, then...

Although extremely popular,

the fairground bingo games were skirting around

what was acceptable under British law back in the 1950s.

In the fairground, they always play for prizes, never for money.

That's why, if you like, it was tolerated. We called 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, it's here for two weeks,

"it's a game of skill." Ha-ha!

And so they let it go.

In any case, the powers that be

were far more pre-occupied with a different type of gambling.

The big social scourge in that period was street betting.

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 workplace had a bookies runner,

so street betting needed sorting out.

ARCHIVE: Runaway rascals up against the law!

Big changes were on the horizon.

The Conservative Government at the time

proposed to legalise 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 Office assured the MPs that were considering it

that gaming would not be profitable.

So bingo definitely wasn't top of the Conservative's agenda

when they decided to go ahead with the 1960 Betting and Gaming Act.

But by passing the bill,

they legalised commercial bingo for the very first time.

BINGO CALLER: 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% of that went back in prizes

and 10% 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 January 3rd you've got the first bingo club

and by the end of January you've got an explosion of bingo clubs!

# You shake my nerves and you rattle my brain... #

The doors flew open and bingo halls opened for business -

big business.

# Goodness gracious, Great balls of fire! #

In the early '60s, the bingo boom was huge.

ARCHIVE: £100,000 a week

is gambled in the big bingo clubs.

The Treasury did do a survey in 1963 during which they established

there were 13 million 700-and-something thousand

members of bingo clubs, so we're looking at a lot of bingo clubs.

-Definitely.

-Are you going to spend all your afternoons

-and evenings in here from now on?

-Definitely!

Wish we could do it every day. We'd love it.

By 1966, 24% of the population was playing bingo,

so that's almost a quarter of the population.

Oh! I bet you're excited about this, aren't you?

I'm so excited, I could do with a drink of whisky.

-What is it? £47...?

-£47, two shilling.

-What are you going to sit through?

-Oh, to the last session.

-And again in the evening?

-Oh, definitely.

-Are you? You're a real addict now, are you?

-Not half!

# Great balls of fire! #

Few could have foreseen

just how quickly commercial bingo would take hold.

But while the government may have misjudged its potential,

others most definitely hadn't.

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 the explosion of commercial bingo.

Eric Morley was the driving force behind the Mecca organisation.

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.

ARCHIVE: In the last ten years, box-office takings have been halved,

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, erm,

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 centres 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 these buildings, and he put two and two together

and he made a very, very successful four out of it.

Morley was so convinced by the power of bingo,

that Mecca immediately started an aggressive expansion programme,

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 showmen, with their knowledge of bingo,

and they'd been playing it on the fairgrounds for a long time,

and their bit of finesse, their bit of skill, at entertaining,

they were all... We use the word - 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, that bit of finesse of entertaining,

they made a success of turning cinemas into bingo halls.

Thousands of them.

In the monochrome world of early '60s 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 Phoenix, Elsie Tanner, who was on Coronation Street

and used to come regularly to the bingo hall to present things for me.

Something that had once been just a holiday past-time

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 prices.

They were glamorous places.

The prizes were not just cash,

the prizes were designed to be glamorous.

So we had mink stoles, we had cruises in the Mediterranean,

to Monte Carlo, for example, or Biarritz.

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.

BINGO CALLER: Five and nine, 59.

Seven and six, 76.

Now, when you are playing for thousands of pounds,

you can't make a mistake,

so the numbers then had to be called precisely,

clearly and correctly.

So there was no argument that you had misled a number.

BINGO CALLER: 49. On its own, number two.

So if you like, money changed the way bingo was called.

It's now a commercial game.

44. all the fours, 44.

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, cos that is crucial.

Bingo time.

But something of the language survived

and continued to evolve in social clubs and seaside bingo.

One and six.

Top of the shop, nine-oh, 90.

We have bingo seven nights a week, plus Sunday afternoon.

-One and six, sweet 16.

-Yeah!

-Hold your card up please.

Bingo has always been part and parcel of life, a working man's life.

On its own, number seven.

I used to call bingo numbers out.

Doctor's orders, number nine.

Legs, 11, that always gets a whistle or a tap on a glass.

Those wonderful legs, 11.

-WOLF WHISTLES

-Thank you, whistlers.

And any way up, six and nine, 69.

Halfway there, four and five, 45.

Shut that door, number four.

Dinky doo, number two.

Deck of cards, 52.

All the threes, 33.

Kelly's eye, number one.

-Five and nine, the Brighton line.

-ALL: Oooh!

Thank you.

Today they remain so deeply embedded in popular culture,

it would be impossible to grow up in Britain

and not know a single bingo call.

Getting plenty, number 20.

The same modernising forces

that ditched the traditional calls in the '60s

were also at work taking the game in other new, commercial directions

as more and more people were getting on board.

Four and one, 41.

Bingo trains are an absolutely awesome 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 and announced on a tannoy system

and you had people wandering up and down, if anybody shouted house,

there was a person in each carriage

who could check the numbers and make sure.

And they would go, for example, from London to Brighton,

London to Margate, Manchester to Blackpool -

anywhere where there was a seaside resort, basically,

and a population to take them to it.

Two and eight, 28.

-House!

-CHEERING

The bingo explosion

was not only a big money-spinner for the main operators,

it was also good news for a small Sunderland printing firm

which produced the all-important bingo cards.

The '60s were a massive period for us.

We went from 12 staff, 13 staff at the beginning of the '60s

to, at the end of the '60s,

the beginning of the '70s, around 500,

so we really, really grew.

We were starting to print bingo

at 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 done by hand.

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 a discretionary income that they could spend.

They had already found they liked gambling on bingo

when they went on holidays, and, "Look at this,

"we've got a bingo place opening up right in the centre of town.

"It's open in the afternoons, I've done my shift in the morning,"

a lot of women only worked part-time,

"I can pop down the bingo for the afternoon

"before I collect the children from school at four o'clock."

Often they'd go from work to home, change and then go to bingo.

Two-thirds of the people playing in those days were women.

-NEWSREEL:

-Nobody knows how many bingo players there are,

but it's not less than six million and probably nearer ten.

Most of them are women. Most of them are regular.

Many spend £5 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,

"Well, why can't I go out and have a bit of time on my own?"

A lot of men, it's quite acceptable for them

to go out to a football match,

to go fishing, do whatever,

whereas women were perhaps beginning to be a bit assertive

and say, "Well, what about me?"

The thing you always forget -

probably the only safe environment for a woman to go on her own.

She could go there without being accompanied 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 totally safe environment.

She got nobody getting drunk and chatting her up, to 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 is the boss and I have seven sons.

I'd like them to take after their father.

Because he's the boss, I have to ask his consent

if I can go out to see friends.

You know, women didn't go into pubs,

they did have to get permission to go out without their husbands,

they did have to prioritise 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.

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 and, yeah,

that was my escapism, really.

I like coming because it's somewhere you can come on your own.

Like, if you go in a pub and you're a woman and you're on your own and...

You just don't do it. You can come here, either with someone,

with friends, with your partner or on your own.

Yeah. And no men want to come as well so it's really good!

It's a great day out. It's a social day out.

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 caring place.

But the sight of thousands of women queueing up for a flutter at bingo

was more than many could bear back in the '60s.

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 The Times, an editorial that headlined...

We have condemnation of the players as stupid, naive, ignorant.

Are you going to gamble away all your housekeeping money?

No, certainly not.

There were stories about women

supposedly frittering away their housekeeping money,

there were stories about women neglecting their children,

and some of that was the kind of thing

that is often levelled at women anyway.

The press reaction was as you would expect them to.

It was something they could sell papers on.

If they found one child stood outside a 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 scorn.

-NEWSREEL:

-Bingo, the most mindless ritual achieved

in half a million years of human evolution.

There is a lot of snobbery around

and quite a lot of hypocrisy and the usual elitism

around anything that working-class people enjoy.

How often do you come here?

-Twice a week?

-That's every week.

-That's every week.

-How much money do you spend here?

-On the average, about 30 bob.

-Have you got any children at all?

-Unmarried.

-So you've got no family problems?

-No family problems.

-Wouldn't you rather be doing something else?

-Such as?

I'd say on an evening like this, walking, cycling or all sorts of...

No, this suits me down to the ground. I get wonderful entertainment here.

You know, whether it's greyhound racing or going down to the pub

or the working men's club, those sorts of activities

are seen as less educational, they're less favoured.

-NEWSREEL:

-The Theatre Royal, Margate, a fine 200-year-old house,

the second oldest theatre in the country.

But the queue I found outside wasn't waiting to see the play,

they were waiting to play bingo.

Mr Brown, are the bingo sessions helping the theatre much?

Well, they're not at the moment

but we're hoping during the winter period

when audiences are low, they will.

This is a very old theatre.

Do you think this is a very dignified way of helping it?

It's not a dignified way but it's a means to an end.

Isn't there a danger that it might turn into a bingo parlour

rather than a theatre? How does your regular company feel about it?

Well, we have a member of the company here. Susan?

She would probably tell you more than I can. Miss Matthews.

Susan, you work in the box office, don't you, this afternoon?

Yes, on Sundays.

How do the actors feel about this bingo business?

Well, we don't like these posters put all round our beautiful old theatre.

To begin with, we didn't like it at all.

But taking the long view, if it means that we can have 12 months' work

instead of just a seasonal period, then we are 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 the 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 of the street was very much changing.

People were beginning to live in high-rise blocks of flats.

Women would still go 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 a lot of houses

were not places that people actually socialised in.

We've got this mythology, really, about working-class life

that people were always popping in and 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 your mates doing an activity together,

bingo really fulfilled that.

So for the ordinary working people of this country, it was a godsend.

The cinemas had closed, they needed a community action.

It's no good sitting at home every night and talking to their neighbour,

they wanted somewhere to go to meet their friends and have a night out.

And the bingo hall became the place -

cheap, easy, friendly,

great community atmosphere.

We've met more people here in the last couple of sessions

than we've met in two and a half years we've lived down here.

What satisfaction do you get out of this?

-It gives me a couple of hours out.

-How much do you spend?

-12 and six on the night.

-That all?

-Mmm.

You think that's worth it for what you get?

Well, I've been a few times and I got £23, one shilling,

so my expenses are paid, aren't they?

For older women, there was 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.

That's also why bingo sessions

during the day are very popular.

A lot of elderly people don't want to come out in the evenings.

Every Wednesday about quarter past, half past 12,

I come round, open the hall,

and then fill the urns with water, ready,

and have it hot for when the players come in

at about one o'clock-ish,

so they can all have a hot cup of tea if they wish.

'And then I do another duty, which is taking their entrance fees of 50p.

'Our basic average is about 30 to 32 every week.

'Sometimes it goes up to about 38, which is a good week.

'But I get excited'

when it gets past 25 cos that covers all the expenses

and gives us a little profit, which is all going into the church funds.

Seven and nine, 79.

It's an escape from the boredom of life.

They come for the companionship, somewhere to go,

somewhere to get out of their little blocks of flats or apartments,

sometimes a slight break away from the family.

And then they're all talking from table to table

and amongst themselves, and probably sometimes

they wouldn't say two or three words throughout the week to anyone else.

It's amazing how there's a jolly, friendly atmosphere.

It's the company. You meet people,

or you probably wouldn't have anybody to talk to. It's nice.

Unfortunately, a lot of elderly people on their own,

they don't have anybody to talk to, and when they do get a chance,

well, like me, they can't stop.

Bingo is now a staple of many church halls.

But back in the '60s,

it was closely associated with other forms of gaming

and helped trigger a wider moral panic

about the extent of gambling in the UK.

-NEWSREEL:

-There must be times when it seems to moralists

as if Britain is a nation given over almost completely to gambling,

the second oldest profession -

the 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 ten goes to church.

God who made us mighty no longer makes us mightier yet.

Since the 1960 legislation liberalising betting and gaming,

many now believed 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 the spa towns of Europe were put in the shade by London.

You know, if you wanted to come and gamble from America,

then this was the 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 are bodies that are opposed to gambling -

the National Anti-Gambling League -

because there's this great outrage against, basically,

two or three things. One is that, in fact,

it's a waste of money, it causes poverty.

Secondly, it corrupts children and women, women and children.

And thirdly, the third real objection,

is that it creates an attitude of getting something for nothing,

something for nowt.

And those were 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 has become affectionately known as Paddy's Wigwam.

The Catholic cathedral in Liverpool had been started before the war,

and to a very different plan.

But, of course, money was much tighter after the war,

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 sort of money quickly, you know,

"bingo games is one very good way forward. We will have bingo games."

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 the Catholic Church,

political changes afoot in 1964

suddenly spelt an uncertain future

for the commercial operators of the game.

CHEERING

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 manufactured the equipment,

I could put them in a club, it became a casino.

And so you open good casinos, bad casinos - too many of them.

Uncontrolled, you could open anywhere.

You buy a cinema, you open.

It was freedom.

When they're uncontrolled, you sometimes get a bad element in them.

And bingo was virtually uncontrolled then.

Up to tricks, 46.

A few unscrupulous bingo halls were operating some sharp practices.

I still think the vast majority of bingo that was played was safe

and was done with the best intentions.

There might have been one or two bad places,

but people were making so much money legitimately anyway,

there wasn't much need to... cheat the system.

But there were one or two cheats. You know, you've got the caller

reading out a different number from the ball.

Number four.

They pull a ball and the ball might have a number three on,

they'd read number 17 because they wanted that ticket to win

and they probably have a list of numbers.

But the attractiveness of bingo

had caught the attention of a far more dangerous fraternity.

Bingo, as it was constituted during this period,

was a very, very good way of laundering money

because bingo players paid cash,

there wasn't a record kept of how many people came in

or how many cards you sold.

If you won a large cash prize at bingo,

or even had a large amount of money that you wanted to put in the bank,

you could say, "Well, I won it at bingo."

There was no check to say you didn't win it at bingo,

so there was nothing to stop you putting the proceeds of a heist

in the bank under the guise that it was a bingo win.

-NEWSREEL:

-Today's report shows that bingo show clubs

have a membership of 14.5 half million members,

casino clubs close on a million,

and that every year one-armed bandits

make a profit of around £10 million.

One of the most lucrative opportunities

for the organised crime gangs were the slot machines

that were situated inside the bingo halls.

There 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 Act.

So we had got a potential problem.

So, there we were,

playing with machines that were prewar, 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.

We won't get involved with what you call them.

But they then shipped 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 loose 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 crack down on commercial gaming.

They actually meant it was going to end.

There was going to be nothing left.

Bingo was seen as much a part of the gaming world as casinos,

so Eric Morley and other operators knew

they had to lobby government to save their profitable industry.

It was up to us to go and explain to government that bingo was not

hard gambling that took away people's livelihoods.

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 2,000 clubs to 121.

But bingo came out of it relatively unscathed.

The National Association of Bingo Clubs has come along with us

in recognising that if bingo is to be this social game,

played, as I say, between neighbours for modest stakes,

then we must have rules which ensure that it doesn't become

a source 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 licences became harder

to come by but the way was clear for the next decade.

Over 8 million people, mainly housewives and pensioners,

play bingo perhaps once or twice a week.

They wager on their clickety-clicks and their Kelly's Eyes

an incredible £185 million a year.

The promoters call 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 1,000.

And soon such amounts would pale into insignificance.

The British tabloids that had 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's

mass-circulation papers joined in.

Millions of pounds are being offered in prizes in the biggest

circulation war Fleet Street has seen for decades.

The bingo games now reach 25 million newspaper buyers a day.

They're all bingo mad.

We used to print the Daily Express bingo and the Daily Star bingo

and the Mirror and...

Massive numbers - we were doing

a five million, six million run.

At its boom, we were having many millions of players playing

bingo in newspapers every day.

We were having play rates for the national papers of about 30%.

Now, what that means is, we were dropping bingo tickets

to every home in the country.

And 30% of those tickets were being played. That is huge.

Absolutely huge.

The Sun newspaper claims that bingo has added

half a million to its sales,

proving a more potent circulation booster

than its more familiar attractions.

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 describe 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 ups and downs of the stock market.

We did games for people like The Times and the Telegraph and whatever

that, at the time, were variations on bingo.

It wasn't bingo,

it was either how the stock market moved or years of wine.

But it was still bingo.

-INTERVIEWER:

-It does smack slightly of an upmarket bingo.

Well, if we are selling four million copies of The Times

by this time next week, I would agree with you, yes.

The newspaper industry was delighted with the results

but traditional bingo operators weren't quite so enamoured.

It isn't bingo. It's a lottery. They draw so many numbers a day.

You have got to buy the newspaper for a week.

It's a sales gimmick to sell newspapers.

They can play for big money because it's an advertising gimmick.

But it is not bingo.

There is no community atmosphere, there is no pleasure.

It is purely a gamble.

The bingo clubs were worried.

Momentum in the halls seemed to be slowing down.

Overshadowed by the newspaper bingo millionaires,

they needed to bring the buzz back.

Bingo was going to be left in the doldrums.

We had the idea of the National Game.

The Bingo Association 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 across to Parliament and we pleaded with government.

The Gaming Board threw up their objections.

The Home Secretary at the time was Douglas Hurd, I can remember it well,

and he said, "No, let the bingo hall talk." He liked it and he listened

to the reasons, the sense, the logic of it and said,

"This is great. These people have to compete.

"The people playing bingo have to have something to go for,

"a big prize."

In 1986, the National Game was born.

I think people thought that we weren't serious,

linking up 800 bingo clubs, National Game by computer.

And, really, there 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 analyse all the tickets

that were sold, know what numbers were called

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 Land's End...

All the numbers are in now so eyes down. National Game.

Full house only.

..and now your prize money went huge.

250, £500,000. Big money in those days.

Suddenly you had a legalised massive jackpot where you might

get 80 or 100 grand for a single game of bingo.

It was just like, "Wow."

Five and nine, 59.

BELL RINGS

That's a good one.

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.

They enjoy the thrill of nearly winning.

They enjoy the actual real thrill when they do win.

They enjoy seeing their friends as well when they're there.

They might go with a group.

But you're not there to chat, you're there to play bingo.

For everybody that won, there was at least 50 people nearly winning.

And the excitement was how close you got to winning.

So that was the thrill of bingo.

You feel like shouting when someone shouts, "Here."

You're like, "No! It's mine!"

The one thing worse than that

-is when your one number is the next number out.

-Yeah.

-You are one away from the line.

-If it wasn't that next number

that come out, I could live with that but when it is the next number,

my heart goes in my stomach. It's like, "Couldn't you just miss it?"

And so it got the adrenaline going,

got the excitement going, got the pleasure of it.

You're shaking all over, aren't you?

I keep willing it out and it won't come. And I call it a bugger.

If you have a win, you are delighted.

If you don't, well, say, "We'll try again next week."

-You get terribly excited each game, do you?

-I get very excited. Yes.

-Before each one?

-Oh, we do, yes.

-During the game.

During and before and before we come. It's lovely.

And when they have won -

ecstasy, they have made it.

Four and six, 46.

-Seven and three, 73.

-SHOUTING

OK. Oh, we have got two.

-Did you win this afternoon?

-I did, yes, twice.

I won £10.

It's my first time winning as well, so it is dead exciting.

I've had nothing yet.

I have won 20 before but that's it. Still waiting for the big win.

Did you enjoy the session?

-Very much, thank you.

-Did you win?

-Yes, 10 shillings.

Whether they won a pound or they won 1,000 didn't really matter.

They would yell just as loud,

they would jump in their seats just as high.

Bingo! I've won.

It might only be four pound but you have won.

I don't know, it gives you a thrill.

Well, it gives me a thrill, anyway.

250 each.

When I win money here, I come in the next day and spend a certain

part of it and go to my bar and get my two bottles of Guinness.

People go and say to you, "I don't go to win, I go for the pleasure."

I think they're fibbing.

I think everybody wants to win.

Whether it is bingo or whatever 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 people became more used to travelling in cars,

you opened bingo halls where you'd got the biggest car park.

Cricklewood was a total success

because it had got car parking for 1,800 cars.

We were now creating the large bingo halls.

The 1,000-seater, 2,000-seater.

People were more demanding now.

They were asking for better facilities.

You have moved to much more upmarket buildings

that are designed for bingo.

JIMMY THOMAS: We could develop a bingo hall

with entertainment around the outer core.

We could put a pub, a restaurant, theatre,

all these things around inside the huge shell

and then put a couple of thousand seats in the middle of it.

So they became the next generation of bingo halls.

When I walked in, I couldn't believe it.

I thought, "Oh, this is great, isn't it?"

Everything matches everything, doesn't it?

-Yeah, yeah.

-Everything matches everything.

-Beautiful, yeah.

It's out of this world.

Big prize money

and the new super-sized, specially-designed halls

seemed to have created a bright 21st-century future for bingo.

-A very good evening to you all. Good evening.

-ALL: Good evening.

But then something came along that had potential to extinguish

this favourite 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 bingo players.

65, 70% of people in bingo halls smoked.

It's a nervous reaction when you're playing. You enjoy a smoke.

It was part of the pleasure.

A high proportion of working-class people smoked.

Bingo is a working-class game.

Bingo is also a game for people who take risks on occasions

so when the smoking ban came in, it hit bingo harder,

proportionately, than other pastimes.

We reckoned that that would take 15% away

from the bottom-line income of the bingo hall.

For a lot of bingo halls, that meant closure.

Unfortunately, this is the club that we had to close.

We shut this in May of last year.

Well, we used to have, on a regular basis,

over a thousand people playing in any evening at the Rio Bingo Club.

Nobody can deny it is a more pleasant place to be

in a bingo hall now - cleaner, tidier,

there is not that stink of tobacco.

You're talking to a non-smoker so I am probably biased,

but it did hurt my business and it hurt the bingo business.

And we haven't fully recovered from that.

But over time, it has adapted.

By 2010, there were nearly 13 million less players a year

compared to 2006.

But it still meant that around 48 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 is quite an extensive 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.

It's more younger people now that come. Especially at the weekend.

We've got the lounge and it's just a good atmosphere.

It really is now.

It's a lot more for the younger people now. It's really good.

Bingo's success in attracting a new clientele has been

helped by the creation of separate spaces for those who want

to socialise without disturbing the more hardcore player.

It's got a different vibe about it than everyone seems...

Everyone seems to think it's all for, like, grandmas and stuff

and it's really not.

It's really good fun and you get to have a drink and a laugh.

Cos you've got the loud room and the quiet room,

you can sit in the loud room with your girlfriends

and have a bit of a chitchat and have fun and it's a good laugh, really.

You know, the business is always cyclical.

I think bingo is on an upturn now.

There's still millions of people playing the game now.

I remember people saying, you know, 25, 30 year ago,

"Oh, bingo won't last."

You know, it's still very strong these days.

I don't think, personally, that there will be a time

when bingo isn't popular.

Nearly there, 89.

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 is an egalitarian game, beautifully without pretence,

that has kept us entertained through difficult times,

injected a touch of glamour to the high street

and brought people together.

We have made a lot of friends, haven't we?

I mean, I didn't know Anna until I came to bingo

and then when this opened, we just came on a Friday

and we've been every Friday since.

It does play an important social function.

I think it is important that that does continue.

One and seven, 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, her mind is fresh again."

And that's what bingo does. It makes you work your brain.

And there's always that chance that you might just get a full house.

Bingo!

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."

# Just listen to the music of the traffic in the city

# Linger on the sidewalk where the neon signs are pretty

# How can you lose?

# The lights are much brighter there

# You can forget all your troubles

# Forget all your cares

# So go downtown

# You'll find a place, for sure

# Downtown

# Everything's waiting for you. #

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd