Winding the clock back on bingo

In an age where most of our daily news and entertainment intake comes to us through the Internet, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that it was not always so. My generation of folks (the 20 thru 30-year old age group) is blessed with an intimate understanding of cyberspace, but it’s important to pay homage to the various media elements which allowed us to get to this point. Take bingo’s extraordinary ascendancy into the spotlight for instance – this is certainly a tale worth telling.

Many, many years ago – some have even termed it the Dark Ages (the time before the Internet) – the ease of sharing information cheaply and rapidly across a universal network was severely hamstrung. Prior to the advent of the World Wide Web, people had to rely on radio, television, newspapers and magazines and live events to get their dollop of bingo delivered to them. While none of these mediums are archaic in any sense of the word, they can hardly hold a candle to the digital and electronic age of the Internet.

Paving the way for the future

Several astute readers and friends of mine have posed this question to me:

“Jeremy, how did bingo assume its place in society today? Clearly it was well-known before the age of the Internet and many people were already familiar with it in order for the Internet to popularize it on a global scale”.

I got thinking about statements like this one. Sure bingo didn’t happen in a vacuum. So how did it gain a foothold in UK society before the Internet washed over? The answer is probably as close as the coffee table in your living room – the tabloid press.

That’s right bingo fans. My research into recent history uncovered some really interesting tidbits of information on how bingo gaming companies got their message to reach so many people. It’s true that bingo has always had massive appeal and clearly someone or something was feeding that insatiable appetite for quality gaming. That someone was the tabloid press. Folks who remember the good old days (as I’ve been told) will reflect on those times when papers like The Sun or the Daily Mirror would actually include bingo cards in and amongst the pages in the newspaper. That’s right! I could scarcely believe it myself. These British papers would place cardboard bingo cards in the papers and run bingo competitions on a daily and weekly basis.

This struck me as extraordinary. I mean today we can quite easily log on to one of thousands of bingo sites (in the UK alone there are millions of online bingo players) and download 20 bingo cards for one game if we so desired. We can even customize our cards to expectations. Back to the past (my enthusiasm often gets the better of me!) and it’s clear that back then folks really enjoyed bingo too. Each week, a number or set of numbers would be released and players would collect these numbers as often as the tabloid papers were released and slowly they would compile a winning bingo card. To think that today this is done in a matter of minutes with speed bingo and 75-ball bingo.

Even more extraordinary is the fact that these selfsame newspapers are now running their very own online bingo rooms. Papers like the Sun Newspaper and The Daily Mirror operate popular online bingo rooms.

If you have more information to shed on this wonderful slice of yesteryear bingo news – please feel free to add your comments henceforth.

Image credit: americanvirus