That's A Bingo!!

It’s my first time playing Bingo and I’m barely in the door of The Grand Bingo Club in Whitehall when I make my first mistake.  I try to sit at Vera’s table.  Without warning the  ladies at the neighbouring booths round on me like automated gun turrets, while a small black computer thingy that I hadn’t noticed glowers at me like a guard dog from the countertop.  It is warmly, but firmly suggested that I park myself at an empty table nearby.  Vera’ll be along in a minute to look after me.  As I take my seat I’m practically shaking and it takes me a moment to understand why.  It’s not the open, genuine hospitality mixed with near brutal territoriality that has me shell shocked, but the sheer speed of it.  Manager of The Grand, and forty year Bingo veteran, Bill Priestley, however, isn’t surprised, “These eighty year old women with their walking sticks...they can be really aggressive”.

Entering The Grand is less like taking a step back in time, and more like entering a different world.  To the uninitiated it is at once recognisable while also being utterly alien.  A dizzying roll call of colours and numbers throw themselves at you without any apparent adherence to logic, while everyday terms like “checks”, “books” and “strips” sound like part of a different language. Around you games begin and end suddenly and inexplicably, while players chat to each other, paying little or no attention to the caller’s cries. With everything now computerised the comfortingly familiar elements of Bingo, ie. bingo balls, are no longer part of the game.  Numbers are randomly “generated”, while elderly women tap away nonchalantly on PHDs (those handheld computer thingys), allowing them to play half a dozen strips simultaneously. 

Luckily, Vera is indeed along in a minute and takes me swiftly and mercifully under her wing.  For Vera, a Grand regular of twelve years, this place is like a second home.  “I’m addicted to Bingo”, she tells me openly, “I’m married to it”.  And she’s not alone.  “We have 850 people a night playing Bingo.  Regulars come in here, three, four, five times a week”, Bill informs me. “[But] they’re not here for the gambling...It’s [just] somewhere for them to go, innit?”  It’s a lot more than that. 

It would be easy to suggest that the recent computerisation of Bingo Halls is just the game catching up with the modern world, but in reality this game and its venues have been a step ahead for years.  Gaming sites linked by telephone lines.  Social networking.  Actual gameplay taking a backseat to chatting with fellow gamers.  You think that social gaming started with World Of Warcraft?  The Grand Bingo Club has been doing it since the Sixties.   

The roots of The Grand run deep in Whitehall.  Despite its cinema facade, no one, from management to regulars seems to be able to remember it as anything else.  In fact it hasn’t operated as a cinema since 1975, and was a functioning Bingo venue as far back as 1963, then run as a fundraiser by Gael Linn. 

Of Bill’s 850 “nightly regulars” 350 are currently sitting in the 600 capacity room in Whitehall.  ISDN lines “link” similar rooms at Crumlin and Cabra, aswell as a fourth smaller hall in Bundoran, tripling the crowd, the prize money, and ultimately, the takings.   But this network isn’t some modern marvel brought about through 21^st Century technical wizardry.  This is simply an updated version of how Bingo has been played in Ireland for fifty years.  “Well, before, it would just be called over the telephone and repeated in the local hall”, Bill informs me, “So nothing’s changed really”. 

Looking around The Grand “luxurious” is not a word that immediately springs to mind, but with the warm, welcoming buzz to the room, it is easy to see the appeal.  Staff and regulars are on first name terms, while newcomers are quickly made welcome.  There is a close knit, familial feel, a rare connection that technology hasn’t yet managed to sever.  “We tried online Bingo”, Bill tells me, “but they didn’t take to it.”  Which brings him back to the allure of Bingo for The Grand regulars.  Online Bingo is about gambling, he says, whereas with land based Bingo “It’s a social night out.  They’re not into playing Bingo [online] all day, you’d have no life, would ya?  No, it’ll never take away from this”, he waves his hand around the room, “Well, I ‘ope not”.

While it may appear rooted in the past, with an aging clientele, you simply cannot dismiss modern Bingo.  Figures released recently in the UK put Bingo as the most popular leisure activity for women between 20 and 25.  So who knows, maybe this whole social gaming thing will actually take off.

This article appeared in the April 2010 issue of The Dubliner Magazine