It is almost 30 years since the first televised national lottery draw, an anniversary that will fall just before the divvying up of the next round of elite sport lottery funding at the end of the year.
Discussions over who gets what from UK Sport are currently under way in the Olympic after-wash, a process trailed over the summer by the slightly nauseating sight of victorious British athletes routinely giving a shout out to “all the lottery players back home”, essentially thanking losing gamblers, scratchcard addicts and the poor for buying them a canoe.
This is not their fault of course. It is how the system has been arranged. The government is effectively telling its athletes to do this: grow the gambling pot if you want to be funded. But at times like these, it is worth remembering how far we have come with this process.
It has been more or less scrubbed from the collective memory – why don’t we talk about this every day? – but that first live draw began with Noel Edmonds literally driving the draw machine (“Guinevere”) to BBC Television Centre in an armoured van, chatting to the cameras from behind the wheel, slick in a shiny beige suit, and looking, as ever, as though he’s about to pull an Uzi from a concealed shoulder holster and demand £400bn in bearer bonds or he releases a nerve gas into the water system.
Edmonds would lead his motorcade right out on to the studio floor, greeted by cheers and whoops as he pirouetted down from the cab, snapping out his words, movements slick, hair perfectly primped and fluffed, like a golden sex-wolf, and talking suddenly in urgent tones about TELEVISION HISTORY and how the NATION HAS BEEN GRIPPED.
The point being, this was presented entirely as light entertainment, as a state-sponsored game show. Before long the draw machine itself was welcomed on stage to roars and screams and gusts of dry ice, standing there sadly like a depressed robot. Noel continued to caper and whirl, snapping his cuffs down, japing with the crowd, and only slightly, and in snapshots, looking like he’s got a recently severed fox’s head inside his glove box.
A doom-laden nuclear-age countdown was followed by Edmonds literally screaming out the numbers (14! 19! 22!). Watching this at home, I can remember being genuinely astonished I hadn’t won. My numbers looked like the right numbers. I’d followed all the instructions, submitted to lottery fever. Perhaps the draw was wrong?
On the other hand, and as the next 30 years of expansionism have demonstrated, this is also the most successfully marketed gambling product in British history, a win for the house every time, where the house also gets to act like it’s not really the house at all, but your house (just to be clear the lottery is now operated by a company belonging to a Czech billionaire with recently severed ties to the Kremlin).
It is part of a wider process. Fast forward to now and the degree to which gambling has been embedded in our everyday lives is startling. To get an idea of this just watch Super Sunday this weekend. The last one featured an odd moment before kick-off, with the key punditry lineup already pitch-side talking about half-spaces and defensive lines, then shifting without a blink into chatter about a gambling product involving zany cartoons of Jamie Carragher and Gary Neville with the chance to win £250,000 and a trip to, of all places, Qatar (where gambling is a crime).
All of this is entirely legit of course, as long as you can prove that kids don’t watch football or like celebrities. But it is just another step into the mainstream, Sky’s key faces pushing betting vehicles as just another part of the bantz to a Sunday teatime show.
Why talk about this now? In part because it became clear this week that, even with a new government, nothing much is going to change when it comes to sport and gambling. On Wednesday the Gambling Reform committee held a summit in Westminster in which campaign groups presented further evidence of the harm normalised everyday gambling does, often to young and vulnerable people.
But there seems also to be widespread acceptance that nothing is going to change any time soon. Keir Starmer’s Labour government may be fearlessly interventionist when it comes to the public intake of energy drinks. But as yet there is nothing in the pipeline to address the UK’s gambling culture. In an entirely unrelated development, the Labour Party also received £400k (this is not a typo) in donations from gambling companies in the past four years. UK politics: a mind-bending world.
The other reason for mentioning this is the lottery itself, which was such a major theme of the sporting summer. The lottery is great in so many ways. It does many good things for deserving charities, fulfilling its “Additionality Principle”, adding value via causes the government would not usually cover. UK Sport does also receive government money but the lottery funding is utterly key, as evidenced by the gold medal count of the past 30 years. Rightly so. Athletes should be funded properly. The question is: should they be funded by gambling?
And let us be clear, no matter how many times it uses the word “play” on its website, the lottery is a state casino that rests entirely on luring you into gambling. And gambling is addictive. Gambling is an industry that profits from good times and fun, but also from misery, ruinously hyper-available since the deregulations of the Blair years and the simultaneous appearance of smartphones, the crack pipe in your pocket, permanently lit like the Olympic flame.
Lottery research shows its revenue is drawn disproportionately from people on low incomes. Its scratchcards have been hugely successful, a habit so addictive that the end of this month will see new rules that dictate you can only buy 10 at a time (ludicrously, as you can simply go next door and buy 10 more).
Is this really how we want to fund our sport? It is certainly convenient. Successive UK governments have been able to neglect public facilities, to shrink sport in schools, while benefiting from an elite performance culture that gives the illusion of success, golds to wave and cheer about.
And guess what? We don’t have to pay for this either. People who like gambling will pay for it. The national lottery can flog Team GB scratchcards. The BBC can promote this harmful activity in its broadcasts. It’s win-lose all round.
That big Saturday draw has long since had its moment. Edmonds never presented again. He’s still big. It’s the lottery that got small, or rather more diffuse and targeted, spreading out into midweek stuff and over-the-counter fixes, Thunderwang, Fun Scratch, Vern’s Lucky Balls.
This is all now fully embedded, industrialised, and irreversible without some entirely improbable public commitment to sport funding. There is a sadness to the realisation that this is unlikely to change, that the government simply cannot afford to step in and provide the same level of support, that decades of austerity and cuts have led to lottery funding filling so many other gaps too.
For now we will carry on with this version of success, a place where it is structurally necessary for athletes to encourage gambling on the state broadcaster in order to remain successful. Thanks to all the players! And please (as if you could) don’t stop.
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• This article was amended on 14 September 2024. The national lottery is operated by the Czech billionaire Karel Komárek’s company Allwyn, rather than being “owned” by it as an earlier version suggested; the lottery is state-licensed.
