Bingo Hall

Passengers on C Deck, or a bingo hall?

In many English towns and cities, beyond the shopping malls, between the ring-road and the town centre, you will find trading and industrial estates. They are not pretty places.

There is no scenery or landscape there, just rawness; a maze of tarmac tracks and signs between the weedy lots where  "industrial units" have been placed. No-one even calls them buildings because they are simply very big boxes that can be used as a factory, office, cinema or shop. You see the same structures outside towns in the USA but they are usually strung out, far apart, along the highway. Our trading estates are packed tightly onto acres where, only a few years ago, a farmer grew cereals.

The older estates have been planted-up with thorny bushes to stop people walking round them and to soften the squareness of the buildings and bill boards. Those bushes attract a lot of litter, but also provide some habitat for wildlife. Rabbits emerge to graze where urban foxes hunt them down. Berry- eating birds just love industrial estates. Gulls nest on the roofs of factories and their wailing, mewling, full-grown chicks often spend their formative weeks arguing over discarded sandwiches and Big Macs under the lights, all night long. For the wildlife every night is party night, but for humans? Probably not.

Party night. 

Of course, the brightest glow in the sky above the trading estate is reserved for those units that do attract people at night; the superstores, the cinema, the swimming pool, the bowling alley and the bingo hall.

Until this week I had never been to a bingo hall. It was about as low on my to-do list as "get a tattoo" but there we were with our free dabbers (big, fat marker pens) with our eyes down for a full house. (I had no idea what that meant before.) 'Why do this to ourselves?  Our friend Judi

The Gala Bingo Hall lies between the German Lidl supermarket and the American Toys-R-Us, so it might be considered a prime location by a developer, but you and I would probably not notice it at all. We drove straight past when we were looking for it. However, the generous car-park was absolutely full when, coated and gloved against the freezing wind, we skirted the side of the building and found the door.

Inside our reception was warm and welcoming. We were greeted by friendly, cheerful staff into what was obviously a thriving and pretty slick operation; smarter than a multiplex cinema and more like boarding a cruise-ship. We entered the hall through a Las Vegas-style arcade packed with gaming machines and amusements and looked out for the balloons that we were told would be above our friend's table. We just stopped and stared in amazement. This place was huge! There must have been hundreds of tables in the main floor and dozens more with specialist computer desks in a raised area. It took us minutes to focus and a sweep the room, row by row until we saw our group, way off in the distance.

Judi and Hanna with a dabber.

The illusion of being on a ship was hard to shake off because of the scale of the room and it's decor, and because all the furniture was bolted to the floor. At least we didn't hit an iceberg.

This whole Bingo industry is founded on the number-game we used to call "Housey-Housey". The caller shouts out the numbers and you cross them off or cover them with counters on your card. If you complete a row and shout out "Bingo!" or "House!" before anyone else can, you win.

Simple? -Not any more. Just to play the basic game you have to follow six cards at once and they call out the numbers so fast that you have to use a special pen to efficiently dab big dots on each number. You are so busy just keeping-up that you would not have time to notice if you did get a line.  It doesn't end there either, because in round two you have to get two lines to win, and in round three you have to get all three lines on a card; a Full House.

Between paper-based rounds you can play computer versions with bigger prizes. That's when we went to get our fries and mayo. There was a bar and a canteen serving hot meals. On our night we had food, free games and bottle of bubbly, all for only £5.  It was a cheap night out, enjoyed by hundreds of people, almost all taking it more seriously than we did. And they were surprisingly young; mostly couples in their twenties, I'd guess, with a few "oldies" and no kids at all.

Don't go and leave us here!

We had to leave early to let Dan's carers go home, which meant that we were only just getting the hang of it when we quit without winning anything. It was fun though and I can tick the experience off my to-do list now.  Where can I get that tattoo?