Firetop

For as long as I can remember, my mother-in-law plays Gala Bingo in Crawley every Sunday evening. Occasionally my wife has attended too - leaving me free to work or Xbox. Yesterday with Suzie_Q at 39 weeks and getting too large to walk or travel far, play sports, or generally exert herself, I was asked to go to bingo with them too. Since there is little else Sue and I can do together besides watch TV, and I couldn’t have my wife sitting alone in the no-smoking area of the bingo hall (an almost empty area), I put my usual apprehensions to one side and threw caution to the wind. By the end of the night I was no wiser as to what makes so many fat, miserable, old people spend their wages on such a pointless and unenjoyable activity full of moaning, groaning and smoking. They would all be better off betting on sensible and entertaining things like horses and football.

The staff member who greeted us at the front door should have been all I needed to take into consideration when trying to imagine what it would be like inside this Crawley bingo hall; like so many of the staff at Gala he wouldn’t have looked out of place at a CB Radio club convention in the early nineties. Having completed my membership form I received my lovely bright yellow Gala Bingo membership card, giving me the freedom to exchange £21 for the privilege of staring at six boring bingo cards for several hours, listening intently to the bingo caller as he read numbers surprisingly fast.

At first I found it hard to keep up with my black felt pen and six cards to check, so Sue exchanged it for her bright pink Gala Bingo dabber – this made it much easier to keep track of whether I was a winner. Each time somebody shouted out to say they had completed a line, two lines or a full house, the hall was filled with moaning and groaning. All the Gala Bingo players were desperately waiting to hear their number called, when it wasn’t, down went one hundred dabbers, one hundred people sighed and moaned and then one hundred cigarette lighters clicked into action. This was unless a ‘false call’ was verified however, at which point an air of hope returned to the silent rows of the undead. I was hoping to god I didn’t win, I didn’t want to be the cause of so much misery and the focus of so much jealousy and negative feeling.

Perhaps I’m being a little harsh, maybe bingo just isn’t for me; one player in Crawley did manage to win £4,500 during a regional link up (to which three people clapped, the rest of the bingo hall just got more depressed). There was also the excitement of the bingo caller reading out ‘fifty seven’ instead of the ‘seventy seven’ we could all see on the screen – greeted by yet more joint moaning and groaning and an apology. I’ve drawn a few Harry Enfield comparisons lately on this blog, I wish very much that he had put the ‘Old Gits’ in a Gala bingo hall, it would have suited them perfectly.

After the final winner called out at ten o’clock, people rushed out of the bingo hall like it was the end of school bell – didn’t they want to be there? Couldn’t these people at least try to be a little happier? Will the smoking ban be the end of Gala bingo next week? I don’t think the future of bingo is a bright one… despite the vibrant yellow of the membership cards, young people have Consoles and the Internet to stare at when they’re bored, beats a page full of numbers and an ink stained hand.

Technorati Tags: gala bingo, bingo, bingo hall, gambling, crawley, harry enfield

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