Bingo!!

Growing up in a Bridlington (a seaside town that they forgot to close down) ensured that weekend and holiday jobs were abundantly available. Even to children who were barely old enough to tie their own shoelaces. My first gainful employment was at Joby’s Bingo where, for the princely sum of £1.50 per hour, I was subjected to abuse, saw old women piss themselves and developed an early aversion to Nescafe coffee.

Joby’s was located within a dingy seafront amusement arcade. It seated around forty customers who paid 10p per card and were awarded with prize vouchers worth approximately £1. In order to make break even we required ten cards to be lit up. Any more than that enabled the endeavour to run at a profit. Prizes were located in glass cabinets to which I held the keys. The more wins a customer racked up, the better the prize they could claim. It was my duty to administer winning tokens and swap them for the appropriate prizes whilst also keeping the ‘contestants’ topped up with extraordinarily cheap tea and tar-like coffee – each dispensed from large thermos devices.

As my innate charm became more apparent (largely through my flirtatious nature with players’ bored granddaughters) I was given increasingly important jobs to do. This rapid ascension through ranks soon saw me become Brid’s youngest ever bingo caller – a skill I learned at the knee of an elderly cock-er-nee name Richard.

Richard was a proper east London charmer. Bespectacled, balding and round-bellied, he nonetheless believed himself to be the most attractive man on the Esplanade. His confidence was legendary – he would chat-up absolutely anyone. Nobody was safe from his silver tongue – the old dears visibly wilted at his attention. On the rare occasions that he wasn’t bantering with the blue-rinsed brigade he was crooning into the microphone or belting out music-hall standards.

Despite all this, I was not overly fond of the man. He was slightly creepy and far too keen to pair me off with young girls whose mothers he fancied. And sharing a mic with him was not an enjoyable experience – his sour breath lingered on the sponge cover and was utterly inescapable. My only respite from Richard occurred when the Big Boss Barry was in town to give him an occasional day off.

I much preferred Barry. He referred to me as a ‘Mongolian cheese rat’ for reasons I have never fathomed, but was a lovely man. I think Joby had maybe been his father and he clearly loved the bingo and arcade he’d inherited. Sadly, as a trip to the seaside became a less popular day-trip for us Brits, Barry decided to cut his losses on the arcade and left. Under new management I felt uncomfortable and bowed out too.

I soon resurfaced in the arcade next door. There, my first job was to dive headlong underneath the ten pin bowling to rectify any problems. The bowling alley, you see, was an old fashioned one where the skittles were lowered into place by pieces of rope. These ropes stayed attached even once they skittles had been knocked down and this, very often, led to tangles and knots which I was charged with untangling and unknotting.

My skills were wasted in bowling, however, and my new employers soon realised that my confidence in front of an audience would serve them better as a Grand National commentator. I was promoted to the glorified donkey derby where my job was to generate and sustain interest in the dullest seaside pastime imaginable – rolling balls into holes in order to make mechanical horses jerk along an enamelled racetrack. The prizes (as at Joby’s) were the traditional tat associated with such games and in similar style to the bingo a minimum number of players were required to make the game viable.

My mentor here was Harry: slightly goofy man with walnut skin and hair too long for a man of his age. I would later realise that he was shagging the proprietor, that he came from a travelling background and had lost Bridlington’s prime real estate on the toss of a coin. But at the time I just thought he was a flash bastard who wore Hugo Boss jeans to work in an amusement arcade.

From Harry I learned the clichéd language of horse racing. I had a whole armoury of phrases, quips and put-downs with which I would embroider my commentary. I even made up some of my own. But ultimately it was a repetitive affair which offered little opportunity for self-expression – except when it was quiet...

During slack times it was my job to encourage people into my domain. This was both difficult and dull. But it did enable me to develop a few jokes, a deadpan persona and a line in self-deprecating humour which did not endear me to management. And I became even less popular when I took to stealing a basketball from one of the arcade games, taking it outside with me and juggling it like a football whilst half-heartedly trying to entice people inside on the radio-mic. I got sacked. But not before I’d stolen one of each Loony Toons soft-toys from the grabber machines for my siblings.

From there I made a move to Harrison Leisure - a fruitful partnership which would last over ten years. After an extremely informal interview with Moomin-like proprietor Michael, I was assigned to duties in Indiana Jones’ Trail and The Crystal Maze.

The Trail was an enormous adventure playground which I had frequented as a child. Filled with slides, rope bridges and bouncy castles, it was a youngster’s dream. It was a teenager’s nightmare. I dealt with snapped wrists, banged heads, pissed pants and crying kids. Parents loved leaving their offspring for as long as humanly possible – not least because there was no time-limit on how long you could play. As almost every mother, father, uncle, grandparent or family friend dropped off their progeny they would loudly proclaim, ‘see you next a week’. It’s a joke that wasn’t funny the first time I heard it - and never got any more amusing.

Respite from smelly feet and irritating infants came when I was occasionally posted on The Crystal Maze. This was (predictably) a hall of mirrors and glass maze. The work here was simple – collect people’s tickets and then wait for them to emerge from the other side. The only variation to this routine occurred when a small child smashed his face into a glass panel and required rescuing. I could negotiate that invisible maze at phenomenal speed, wiping smeared blood from the glass as I whizzed through.

I went on to work for Harrison Leisure for years, eventually managing the play area, operating fairground rides, supervising their swanky new bar, making ice-cream sundaes and DJing. I also spent my gap year labouring for them in the most badly paid job i’ve ever had. But that’s for another blog...