‘It’s good news! You don’t hear much good news, do you?” At the library in Rhymney, Caerphilly, one morning in May 2022, there’s only one topic of conversation at the “talking cafe”, a weekly event set up to combat loneliness in the small former mining town. Sat in a circle, sipping tea and crunching biscuits, everyone is on about Rhymney residents winning the lottery: more than 400 of them have just shared £3.7m. A documentary crew have got wind of the windfall and are here to shoot The Welsh Valley That Won the Lottery (Channel 4).
The winners were playing the People’s Postcode Lottery, a clever variation on a normal Lotto that randomly selects a postcode instead of numbers then assigns a large prize to every ticket-holder on one lucky street, with smaller ones going to players close by who have only matched the first half of their postcode. Effectively it sets up a syndicate for your neighbourhood, and in Rhymney where the game is evidently popular it feels like half the town has won.
