Bingo is in decline but Glaswegians remain marking their cards

If you’d asked me about a week ago how I expected researching and writing a piece about bingo to go, I would have said ‘fine’. I would maybe have even said ‘fun’. And I would have been wrong. 

Bingo, I found out too late, is an extreme sport of the extremest proportions: a heads-down, nose-to-the-grindstone, don’t-even-think-about-asking-me-questions-for-your-silly-wee-paper sort of affair. Glasgow is known as the spiritual home of bingo. The BBC has said it, Paisley on the Web has said it, I’ve said it, and according to the hugely popular and highly reliable bingo website ‘bingowebsites.org.uk’, we have more bingo halls per head than anywhere else in Britain. That’s one bingo hall per 52,583 Glaswegians (as of September 2021) compared to one per 278,000+ Londoners.

Bingo halls across the UK have been on a steep and steady decline since 2005, largely owing to the Gambling Act introduced that year, but statistics show that here in Glasgow they’re still going strong. In my quest to find out why, I found out that such statistics barely scratch the surfaces of Glasgow’s bingfatuation.

Before writing this article, my bingo experience was meagre to say the least. That’s not to say I’d never binged, but my bunging was seldom and sporadic. At school, we’d make bingo cards of all the daft sentences our teachers would say in class, and bingo would later rear its ball-round head at charity do’s and Christmas ceilidhs, but I’d yet to set foot in an actual, proper, bingo hall. Walking into Carlton Bingo in Partick is therefore a milestone moment. I receive my bingo membership card with more pride than when I received my diploma in the post after skipping my graduation, and buying my first bingo dauber – clover-green – is likely the best one-pound-fifty I’ve ever spent.

Carlton Bingo is a chain with ten clubs across Scotland, but its Partick location is something of a certified establishment. Known by local bingists as the F&F, or sometimes just ‘The Effs’, it began its life in 1910 as the Star Palace cinema, a picture house whose degree of success is unknown to me, but suffice to say it had closed by 1925 — surviving a world war, yes, but not the cinematic version of The Phantom of the Opera.

At this point it was acquired by the Fyfe brothers – the eponymous 'Effs' – who converted it into the F&F Palais de Danse, a dance hall three nights of the week, a roller skating rink another three, and presumably closed on a Sunday. The building became a bingo hall in the 1960s and has defiantly remained one ever since — no small feat when the number of bingo halls across the UK has decreased by over 75% since 2005 (there’s a degree of discrepancy in the statistics tracking hall totals that year, but they average around the 600 mark, compared to the mid 200s today). So how has the F&F in Partick got so lucky, despite dismal odds?

The answer is that I don’t know, because everyone at Carlton Bingo, customers and staff alike, are far too busy to talk to me. The F&Fs grand hall – a lifesize example of what might happen if the designer of First Bus’s seat covers was asked to put together a visitors room of a prison – is lined in its entirety with bowed heads and furrowed brows, most of them greying and almost all of them belonging to women.

There is no doubt that the hall is still thriving, but my only going theory is that it’s pure bingthusiasm that’s keeping it so, rather than opportunities to socialise. Not one of the women lifts their head from their sheet for so much as a second, and even during the breaks they get their purses full of pounds out to play the additional table games. The bingo caller, too, has not a moment of respite from his constant stream of number-calling until he rushes off during his inadequate break. I had intended to ask him some questions, but after wrongly calling a line I can no longer look him in the eye, so I just play my 12 sheets, win nothing, and decide to write this off as a practice day.

My visit to the Effs certainly confirmed that Glasgow still has a thing for the bing, but I didn’t quite manage to work out why. Six years ago, Mecca Bingo manager Paul McGlinchey told BBC Scotland why he thought such spaces had stayed afloat in Glasgow and not elsewhere. “Edinburgh has been totally taken over by new housing developments,” he said. “Incoming professionals have pushed normal bingo customers to the outskirts of the city… but in Glasgow, people have stayed in the same house for generations and that’s one of the things that has kept bingo buoyant here.”

My second attempt at researching Glasgow's bingo culture is significantly more fruitful than the first – and partly supports McGlinchey's theory. It's Sunday morning and I have gone to the Mecca Bingo in Glasgow Quay. Here, in an almost empty hall, I meet Alistair, a man born for the role of bingo caller with the soft accent of water against rock.

While Alistair declines an interview for PR reasons, he points me in the direction of two regulars who would surely be up for a chat. I pay £5, and in return receive my Mecca Bingo membership card, a 15-page book of games, a free drink of Pepsi, and a Sunday lunch as reminiscent of a stint in the jail as the interior design of the Effs (star ingredient: mystery meat). I play my games, win nothing, and go and chat to Jessie and Georgina, who have just won £200.

“Aye it was two hunner I think,” Jessie tells me nonchalantly when I ask them about their winnings. “Two hunner and something.” It’s her birthday, she is 80 today, and Georgina will be 80-next-month-mind-you. Jessie won the money, but will they share it?

“We always share, no matter what,” says Georgina, and Jessie concurs. “Even if it’s £3.” The pair have been coming to the Mecca Bingo in Glasgow Quay twice a week, every Thursday and Sunday, since it opened 25 years ago. “We were wee lassies then,” says Georgina. “Wee girls.” Is there anything different on a Thursday? “Well, it’s still empty,” Jessie says.

It’s true that Mecca Bingo at the Quay is a barren ground in comparison to yesterday’s bingo-Eden — but this is a Sunday morning after all, and Alistair had told me that they were due to have a very busy night. Still, Georgina agrees with Jessie that bingo numbers are declining. “It’s getting a bit bad now, aye,” she says.

Jessie offers the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic as a possible explanation for the decline. “When they opened again after Covid it was quite dear,” she tells me.

According to the two of them, bingo prices rocketed after the various lockdowns, and while they have gradually returned to normal, the business has never quite recovered its customers from the pre-pandemic days. One potential reason for this is the move towards online gambling during the lockdown. While the gambling industry as a whole took a hit during the pandemic owing to the lack of sporting events to bet on, most online bingo sites reported a significant increase in participants, money spent, and time spent gambling, while revenues for other at-home gambling games such as digital slot machines more than doubled.

The rise in online gambling is widely cited as one of the primary reasons for the decline of bingo halls, the other two reasons being higher taxes as a result of the Gambling Act, and the effects of the 2006/7 smoking ban. But enough women like Jessie and Georgina remain undeterred. “I’ve never smoked,” Georgina explains. 

If you're reading this and you haven't yet joined our free mailing list, click here to get Glasgow's new quality newspaper in your inbox every week.

While many of the major in-person bingo companies, Mecca Bingo included, have their own apps and make a huge portion of their revenue through online gambling, most of them rather surprisingly seem to care about their in-person customers enough to adapt to their changing needs. Mecca Bingo’s free Sunday lunch is an example, an apparent acknowledgement of the hall’s significance as a community space for the elderly.

Both bingo halls I’ve attended also offer the option to have your numbers automatically dabbed on a mini tablet, instead of having to fill out a paper sheet. Jessie, I notice, has been using one of these devices.

“I used to play the books and all,” she tells me, “and I like marking them. But I just put that on auto now.” She made the change to the electronic devices when she noticed she was starting to miss out numbers on her sheet. “It’s cause of her eyes,” says Georgina, who then turns her attention to Jessie. “You’re getting old.”

But despite the increased difficulty of attending the in-person bingo that comes with age, Jessie and Georgina have no intentions of bingoing online. “This is the only way that we meet up, Jessie and I,” Georgina says. “It’s a place to go for a woman, you know? You don’t have to go with a man, you’ve got your pal, you’ve got a cup of tea, you bring a sandwich or something.” This social aspect certainly seems to be the main reason behind the perseverance of in-person bingo in the digital age — even though, bizarrely, no one actually seems to talk to each other while they’re here.

“Aye, we dinnae blether,” says Georgina. “You’ve got to concentrate. You don’t want to miss a number.” Is this – getting all your numbers down and winning – really the reason for coming to the bingo, or do they mainly come for the company? “We’d like to win,” Georgina answers. “But we’re no really greeting. We dinnae cry about it. We’ve been somewhere, we’ve been out.”

While all this provides some insight as to why in-person bingo might still be a hit among the elderly communities of Glasgow, it doesn't really feel like the whole picture. Bingo caller Alistair had told me that the hall was popular on a Sunday night largely due to a younger crowd coming in, and Georgina and Jessie, too, had mentioned seeing younger groups on a Sunday, even an 18th birthday party. This, it seems, could be a key contributing aspect to Glasgow’s binging success. So I make plans to continue my investigation the following week, at the infamous Bongo’s Bingo at SWG3.

This was a mistake. Walking into Bongo’s Bingo I have never felt more alienated from my fellow man. Gone are the teas and the sandwiches and the half-drunk bottles of Irn Bru that littered the Effs and dotted the empty tables of Mecca Bingo. In their place: cans of Red Stripe and ‘Turbo Margaritas’ which taste like E numbers and are served by the pint. I order the latter and push my way back into the darkened bingo arena, now packed to the brim.

These, the people before me, are the new, young, fresh, and brilliant face of bingo. They gather in groups wearing leotards and tutus and novelty bridal wear — and that’s just the men. The women wear cowboy hats and vape indiscreetly into their handbags. Once again, women make for the vast majority of the clientele, though this time, the ages seem to range from around 18 and up to the early fifties.

I will spare you too many specifics of what went on at Bongo’s Bingo. It’s something that has to be seen to be even remotely understood and even then you’ll probably leave with more questions than you came in with.

What I will say, however, is that the event is at all times engaged in an unrelenting effort to present itself as Glasgwegian. Not just Glaswegian — but the epitome of Glasgowdom. The ceaseless sound bites and video clips played between every called number are redolent of the same entry-level Glaswegian tripe that old men regurgitate at me in pubs in England when I tell them where I’m from. That is: Buckfast, Celtic, Rangers, Limmy, and that one viral clip of the mum shouting at her daughters for forgetting to flush the loo. 

“Everyone you see on this stage is from fucking Glasgow,” shouts the MC-cum-Bingo-Caller, a man who exudes the general impression that if he’d put one more grain of cocaine in his last line he’d be flatlining on stage. “We’re here in our home city. We’re all Glaswegians. We’re supposed to know what we’re doing.” He even presents his assistants – two men wearing dresses, in the lads-on-tour sort of way rather than the drag way – by specifying what part of Glasgow they’re from. Messy is from Partick, we are informed, and Juicy Lucy has come all the way from Carnhill. Do they represent modern-day Glasgow? They’re a far cry from Georgina and Jessie from Pollokshields.

Outside in the bar queue, I manage to collar a man and ask him why he’s here. “Well, our birds are here,” he answers predictably. “Also, bingo’s fucking brilliant.” This is interesting – but before I can ask him if he attends any other bingo halls he’s disappeared.

Lindsay and Claire, two women that I chat to in the loo queue, prove to be more informative. Claire is in her forties, but I don’t catch Lindsay’s age, and it’s hard to tell as they’re both wearing enormous sombreros. The pair are repeat customers, and avid fans of Bongo’s Bingo. “In the last year, we’ve been, what, three times?” says Lindsay. “Four times! And we’ve got another one booked for November.” 

Booking, it seems, is essential – the majority of Bongo’s Bingo nights sell out the entire hall at SWG3. I’m surprised to learn that the majority of the customers at Bongo’s Bingo have been many times before. Considerably less surprising is the fact that they seem to come for the entertainment rather than the prize. Many players go out for a smoke or to buy a drink even while the numbers are being called. But Lindsay says that last July she managed to win big. “I won the whole thing,” she tells me. “It was full house, last game, £1500.” 

The rules of Bongo’s Bingo dictate that if two people call bingo on the same number, the winner is decided via a dance-off on stage. This is precisely what happened to Lindsay, and she defeated her opponent by doing the worm. “Well, I don’t know if it looked, you know, the way the worm should look,” she says, “but it won me the money.”

When I ask the two women what draws them to return to Bongo's Bingo, they mention non-bingo-specific features of the event, such as changing themes: Christmas and country-themed nights that allow them to dress up in increasingly elaborate costumes. Not only this, but it seems like a night at Bongo’s Bingo is typically the headliner for an entire elaborately themed day out, which explains the sombreros (the pair had been to El Jefe's for lunch that day), and why the crowd seemed so energetic by 7pm. “The bar is expensive, so you wanna drink beforehand,” Claire tells me. “Yeah,” Lindsay agrees, “you don’t wanna spend all your money in here.”

There is only one thing that seems to tie Bongo’s Bingo and the Mecca Bingo together (other than, you know, bingo) and that is that the bingo itself is simply not the main event. Instead, the bingo is used as an excuse for meeting your old friend, for getting drunk and wearing a silly hat, for simply leaving the house. 

Equivalent English cities like Manchester and Liverpool have seen a huge rise in options for adult ‘play’ – from prison-themed cocktail bars to adult ball pits to hammer throwing while pissed. But it seems that a stubborn Glaswegian-ness has kept the forms of adult play in Glasgow at least somewhat traditional.

The regulars at the F&F in Partick might be hardcore gamblers who are in it to win it, but at Bongo’s Bingo, you can put on a pair of novelty silicone tits and drink Venoms while asserting that you’re continuing a time-honoured tradition of which your granny and her granny before her would have been proud. And you're correct – because after all, your granny at Mecca Bingo is only there to have a night out with the girlies too.