Another voice
The angry caller
Auberon Waugh
`Mhe great new British sport — news- '. paper bingo — went chaotically awry yesterday. Thousands of Daily Mail readers simultaneously claimed that they had land- ed the paper's £35,000 Casino Jackpot. For hours telephone lines to London from all parts of Britain were jammed ...
`One angry caller: "This is the ultimate result of a bingo-barmy society. Newspapers should scrap bingo." Some Londoners took to the streets. They con- verged at the offices of the Daily Mail.'
That report, as anyone will recognise from the prose-style, appeared on the front page of this week's Sunday Times. As always when learning of events through the lower-class newspapers, one can only marvel at the things they discover. I find myself somewhat sceptical about the claim that telephone lines to London from all parts of Britain were jammed for hours. I made several calls to London on Saturday with no difficulty. No doubt the Daily Mail switchboard was jammed, but that is not quite the same thing. But my gravest doubts concern the alleged angry caller who was reported to have said 'This is the ultimate result of a bingo-barmy society. Newspapers should scrap bingo.' These doubts come under three headings: literary; deductive; and intuitive.
Literary: I have been around Fleet Street for 22 years and I know perfectly well that members of the public who telephone or write letters to newspapers are never angry. They are always irate. This word scarcely exists outside newspaper reporting, but by the same token the word `angry' does not exist in journalism to describe a reader's reaction. Words like 'angry' belong to the realm of creative imagination.
Deductive: Unless the Sunday Times reporter, called Mr Simon Freeman, was working on the Daily Mail switchboard at the time, I do not see how he can possibly have known what this 'angry caller' said. He might, of course, have had a crossed line, but the chances are against this. Quite possibly Sunday Times employees have many strange jobs during the week, but I doubt whether a reporter would be engaged in this way on a Saturday morning while preparing a story for next day.
Intuitive: I do not believe that any member of the public who thought he had won £35,000 and then discovered he hadn't would react in this way. There is no earthly reason why such a person should decide that his misfortune was the ultimate result of a bingo-barmy society, or that newspapers should scrap bingo. On the other hand, this might easily be the reaction of a newspaperman given the job of repor- ting the incident. Not to put too fine a point on it, I suspect that Mr Freeman invented this angry caller. Never mind. We've all done worse things than that in our time. Nor does the fact that nobody actually said it invalidate the senti- ment. In fact, I will take this opportunity of saying it myself, suitably rephrased: our society is indeed characterised by a frivolous approach to money; there are sound economic as well as moral reasons why the popular newspapers should retreat from their present circulation contest, at any rate in its present form. A recent breakdown of figures shows that although the Daily Star and Sun increased their cir- culations — by 474,000 and 396,000 respec- tively — as a result of bingo, at a time when everybody else's circulation was falling, the net loss of revenue to Fleet Street has been enormous. The figures given suggest that increased circulation might bring additional revenue of £6 million to Fleet Street, but the cost of the competitions — I am not sure whether that includes the cost of advertising them — is put at £15 million.
In other words, £9 million is being thrown away on this rubbish which might have been spent on improving newspapers, fighting libel actions and hiring better writers. But it is one thing to reach the con- clusion that newspapers should scrap bingo and another to persuade them to do it. The Newspaper Publishers Association was pretty well a dead letter even before the ar- rival of Mr Murdoch, with his desperate anxiety to act the buccaneer, and 'Lord' Maffews, the East End wonderboy. The National Union of Journalists — which could easily rescue the proprietors by demanding an end to the practice — is a hopeless, futile organisation more concern- ed to demand creches for single-parent black lesbian mothers.
I think a more oblique approach is called for. There is indeed a moral objection to what the Angry Caller describes as our bingo-barmy society, and this might come in useful if my arguments persuade the Government to intervene. One must distinguish, however, between dirigiste rhetoric or apologetics and the real reasons for doing anything. In the first instance, one can point out that in a supposedly materialistic society, actual attitudes to money have retreated into fantasy. Any number of examples could be given — the millions of pounds over-subscribed to the Penlee lifeboat fund, the readiness of many idiots to suppose that Sir Freddie Laker might be rescued from his debts by public subscription; the £100,000 awarded to Billy Bremner to compensate him for a slight bruising to his reputation; the demand by parents of dead children that they should be compensated for their loss; the fact that a high proportion of our workforce does ab- solutely nothing to earn its keep, and demands overtime for it. Et cetera, et cetera. All this is most unhealthy. Tut, tut.
On the other hand one must accept that the purpose of government is to direct rather than oppose the mood of the nation. If the country wants bingo, then at least this very human aspiration — to become rich without the slightest exertion or effort might be turned to socially constructive ends, i.e. to government revenue. At pre- sent it is directed only towards destroying the newspaper industry. The weasel ap- proach to this great opportunity would be to impose a betting levy on bingo slips — i.e. popular newspapers — and this is no doubt the approach which would recom- mend itself to a Labour government. What the Government should do instead is to ban all private enterprise lotteries of this sort and convert a large part of the domestic na- tional debt into a national lottery in the form of irredeemable Premium Bonds.
There are several problems with Premium Savings Bonds, or Mac's Flutters, as they were known when they were first introduc- ed. In the first place, the prizes are too few and too small. In the second place, continu- ing inflation has made the whole concept of fixed savings — as opposed to equity or indexed holdings — irrelevant. In the third place, Premium Savings Bonds lack the razzmatazz promotion of private enterprise bingo schemes. In the fourth place there is a general suspicion (which my own ex- perience suggests may be justified) that the whole scheme is crooked, and ERNIE is bias- ed towards new issues. In the fifth place, ERNIE allows none of the fun of a bingo game, which gives a breathless public the opportunity to follow the selection of numbers. I would suggest a single weekly prize of £5 million, nine of £1 million, ten of £100,000 and many thousand awards of £1,000 to be determined as follows: a11 existing domestically owned undated gilt" edged stock would be compulsorily con- verted to numbered units of £1 at par to start things off. No interest would be paid and the stock would be irredeemable. Future government loans would be raised entirely in this form. Tax-free prizes would be at the rate of 11 per cent, to take account of irredeemability. Every unit would have 20 digits in its numbering. A comPtIter would instantly identify the winners of tile, top 20 prizes. Every week the Princess 01 Wales would draw 20 digits (0-9) out of 3
hat. The nation would follow them with bated breath on their own randomly com- puted numberings. At the end, the coot'
puter would announce whose 'bond was closest to the final 20-digit figure, whose was second closest, etc. and which range f numbers qualified for the £1,000 Prtiesci People could check that their own bon numbers were no closer to the magic number drawn by the Princess of Wales; All this would have the useful side-effect M improving the nation's mathematics.
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