The roots of Bingo can be traced way back to the year 1530, when an Italian, state run lottery called "Lo Gioco del Lotto d'Italia" first began. Over a century later, the French adopted a similar game, one version of which used a playing-card grid of numbers. A caller would reach into a bag and draw out wooden tokens which were marked 1 - 90, and the first player to cover over all the numbers on their card would be marked the winner. This was the first lottery-style bingo game to be seen, the craze spread and soon was very popular all over Europe.
The Bingo that we know today was developed during the late '50s and early '60s and its growth is linked with the introduction of television (in particular ITV) which had a damaging effect on cinema ticket sales, as more people could now watch news and other shows from the comfort of their own home. This meant that cinema owners needed to create a new attraction, something that would draw people from the TV set and back to the cinema. That something was Bingo.
To begin with, Bingo was only played on certain days of the week when films were not being shown, but the cinema owners soon found that these 'Bingo nights' were much more popular than then film nights, and so they devoted more and more time to the game - eventually phasing out films altogether. Conversion of cinemas to Bingo halls was a pretty simple task, involving taking out the screen, installing bingo apparatus, removing tiered seating and adding new tables and chairs.
During the 1960s and 1970s, Bingo exploded across the country and almost every town had at least one Bingo hall. The game's popularity went further than just being a numbers game; people came not only to play Bingo, but also to socialise, have a meal and a drink, and catch up on gossip.
As the game's popularity grew, a whole new language evolved along side it, all related to the game and its rules, most famously, the nicknames of the Bingo numbers that callers use. For example, a caller might say "Tony's Den, number ten", or "All the fives, fifty five". Many of the terms are simply rhyming slang; others are based on the shapes of the numbers, for example, number 22, is also called "Two Little Ducks", because the shape of number two is similar to that of a duck's neck. Other nicknames are based on popular culture, for example "The Beatles Number" for 64, simply because of their well know hit "When I'm 64".
Though bingo clubs have struggled to attract the numbers they did during their hey-day, the new generation of online bingo players has appeared, and with them, the age-old game enters a new, phase of its long history.
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