In Liverpool, in a vast warehouse lined with bierkeller trestle tables, each one sardine-packed with people, a woman is dancing. She is dancing on her seat to Europe’s The Final Countdown. With her arms in the air, she is bellowing out the words and, indeed, the synth riff. It is 8pm. The woman is me.
Around me, everyone is doing exactly the same. To my right, a woman in full chicken costume is flapping her wings. To the left, a beautiful dark-haired girl, with the look of an Italian Dolce & Gabbana model at her rich husband’s funeral, is up with her crew, screeching, waving a glass of something sticky and deadly. I look around. I can’t see anybody – not a single person in the room – who isn’t singing along and dancing on the benches.
Just minutes ago, this space – enormous shipping containers fitted out with bar, stage and state-of-the-art sound system – was full, but not mad. People were politely queueing to get drinks, chatting in groups, bustling to the loos in twos and threes. The women are in leopard-print jeans and black lace tops, the neatly clippered men are in head-to-toe black – not tracksuited, but almost. Tonight is an 80s night, so there are a lot of costumes. A man tells me he’s here as Marty McFly from Back to the Future, though, in truth, he’s a ringer for Alan Titchmarsh. A young lad is sporting the full Freddie Mercury: yellow buckled Band Aid jacket, white jeans, vest, muzzy.
The girls on my table have come from north Wales. Ellie, Bethany, Leanne, Kathryn and Holly; it’s Kathryn and Holly’s birthdays. Their look is aerobic: neon turquoise and neon pink. Leanne is in a leotard, Bethany has Barbie earrings. They give me a flashing wristband and some pink beads to wear. They point at me and sing: “One of us, one of us.” I am delighted. Ride on Time comes on and I genuinely go nuts. It is 8.06pm.
Welcome to Bongo’s Bingo, the biggest of big nights out. We’re in music venue Content in Liverpool’s Baltic Triangle and we’re the second sold-out, 900 people-strong Bongo shift of the day, after the afternoon show. Created 10 years ago, there are now more than 40 Bongo’s Bingo shows across the country, on every single weekend, plus regular nights in Ibiza and Dubai – and even a three-night special in Williamsburg, New York. And, yes, despite appearances, it is definitely about the bingo.
Our host, Jonny Bongo (real name, Jonathan Lacey), is on stage. A 38-year-old ex-chef from east Belfast, friendly and upbeat, he’s MC and DJ for the evening as well as the actual boss of everyone employed here. He introduces the onstage dancers, Slutty Susie and Horny Heidi. As you might have guessed, both are men: Cole Fraser and Callum Law. “Hype men, rather than professional dancers,” Jonny informs me later. “You don’t want them to be too good, or everyone will be watching them rather than playing the game.” Susie and Heidi go for saucy groin-pointing, mild twerking, a bit of what we might call nipple work. Usually, Fraser wears a short princess dress as Susie. But as it’s 80s night, he and Heidi are in running shorts, legwarmers and crop tops, plus their usual blond wigs. At one point, Susie is required to do a mild striptease to I Wanna Make Love to You. Unused to his shorts, Fraser gets them all tangled up in his legwarmers. The crowd doesn’t care. They go bananas.
Clubbing in the UK is dying. In December 2024, Britain had 2,264 nightclubs, late-night bars and casinos – 25.2% fewer than in March 2020. Nightclubs have borne the brunt of closures: their numbers have dropped 33.2% since Covid. I talk to one of Bongo’s bouncers, John, who’s been on doors in Liverpool since 1988 and did all the big clubs such as Cream. His theory is that the clubbing scene that he and I remember happened because, in the early 90s, “there was nothing else”, he says. “Pubs shut at 11, [old-school] clubs had door policies [no trainers], everything was done by 2am. So people set up their own nights.” Now every bar is like a club and nights out aren’t created by local people, but corporations.
There are other factors, too. First, young people, including students, aren’t so bothered about drinking for the sake of it (though there’s certainly a lot of alcohol consumed tonight). They’re more health-conscious and, of course, more worried about money, so they booze less. Second, they want to be home earlier. The rise in day raves isn’t just due to oldies wanting to get back before the heating switches off; late-night transport is unreliable (or nonexistent) and people like to make the most of their next day, too. And third, they’re up for doing something proper with their night out. The biggest rise in evening entertainment is in “competitive socialising”: theme bars where you spend your night playing golf, cricket, ping pong, football – or just chuck yourself in a ball pit like a toddler. Or combination events: a brunch with drag acts plus drum’n’bass DJ; an evening mixing cocktails in an immersive (fake) new world. Escape rooms are popular, as are spins on household names such as Cluedo or The Cube. My friends recently went on a Taskmaster night out. (It wasn’t much cop.)
People want an evening that looks good on Instagram, that’s a memorable event – a big experience rather than a quiet night talking nonsense in the pub. A guaranteed good time, with an atmosphere that’s there for the taking. Somewhere where you walk in and everything’s already buzzing, rather than a club where the vibe – the actual essence of the whole night – depends on you. Like a kids’ birthday party: entertainment, food, drink, takeaway plastic presents and all over (bar the tantrums) in three hours.
Before the show, I talk to sisters Sharon and Sue – the first in the queue outside – who have been there since 5pm. They come to Bongo’s Bingo every three months and they like to arrive early so they can get to their preferred seats: end of the row, near the toilets and the bar, not too close to the stage. “You don’t want the dancers’ sweat all over you,” says Sue. They’ve been to various themed versions of Bongo’s Bingo. “I like the cowboy ones,” says Sharon. “All the men are in Stetsons and the dancing is great.”
Sharon and Sue also go to “proper” bingo nights with their mum at Mecca, which they enjoy. “It’s much more serious, though,” says Sharon. “We get told off for laughing.” It costs more, they say: they spend about £50 at Mecca, including a meal. But at Bongo’s Bingo, it’s just £25 for the entrance fee and the bingo book, and they buy drinks as and when they want them.
“There’s bigger prizes at Mecca – I won £1,500 one time,” says Sue. “You can win money here but it’s not so much,” says Sharon. “It’s about the other prizes. I really, really want to win the unicorn!”
The big fluffy pink unicorn, along with packets of Coco Pops, a disco-ball helmet and a pink Henry vacuum cleaner, is the classic Bongo’s Bingo prize. “I got my photo taken with the girl who won the unicorn last time,” says Sharon. “But tonight’s gonna be my night!” She punches the air.
“Also,” she says, “I think they gas us.”
What?
“They pump something into the air that makes everyone get up dancing and going crazy.”
To be clear, Bongo’s Bingo does not “gas” anyone. What the show does, though, is clearly provide a way of behaving. We are told what to do, and when, from start to finish. It’s like being at primary school, or a Hiit class. When to stand up, when to sit down, how to play the bingo, when to go to the bar. A friend who’s been to a Bongo’s Bingo in London says that what she likes about it is that, if you’re socially awkward, you don’t have to make small talk. You’re too busy doing things. Obviously, things get a little looser (drunker) as the night goes on, but on stage, Jonny runs a tight ship.
Before the bingo starts (there are three sessions of a few games each), he tells us all how to play. Not just when to shout “bingo” (one row, two rows, full house), but also what to do when he calls out certain numbers. If No 1 is called, there’s a quick blast of Blondie’s The Tide Is High. Anything involving the No 8 means we all have to repeat it in Jonny’s Northern Irish accent (“ay-ut”). No 6 means we shout “Oi, oi, cheeky, cheeky” and do the macarena. Sixty-nine gets “a meal for two and the view is fine”, nothing more. But when 33 – “turty-tree” – is called, Jonny plays an Irish song and everyone dances. Up we get to C’est La Vie by B*Witched and the Pogues’ Fairytale of New York, during which the girls and I descend from the table, put our arms around each other and do the cancan.
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Whenever anyone wins and gets on stage, Jonny asks them their name and where they’re from, and no matter where they say, everyone boos: not nastily, just because it’s funny. Every winner dances about with their prize: one woman from Widnes gamely bounces on a space hopper across the stage. There’s a hen-and-stag-night vibe, obviously, but as the crowd is about 75% women, the atmosphere isn’t confrontational, but almost family-like. At one point, I see a bouncer gaze intently at a group of people and then move swiftly over. But it’s only because they’re about to lift up one of the girls in the air, like Baby in Dirty Dancing. He’s there in case they drop her.
Backstage, where I go to talk to Jonny, is full of young men, benign and congenial. I meet the brother of Everton and England goalie Jordan Pickford. He’s from Newcastle and, yes, Bongo Bingo is in that city too, he tells me, at the Boiler Room. He likes it better in Liverpool, though: “It’s so friendly.”
Jonny came to Liverpool when he was 19, as his then girlfriend had got into the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts. He loved the city, went down to London for a couple of years to manage bars there and then returned. In 2010, he set up Jonny Bongo’s pub quiz.
“I loved pub quizzes but it can be a bit stale – the same people going, the same teams winning,” he says. “So I came up with my own format. Mad bonus rounds, a dance-off between the two top teams, silly questions like: ‘Which is the better flavour of Viennetta, mint or original?’”
Mint, obviously.
“No, it’s original,” he says. “There were some arguments about that. One bloke followed me out, going: ‘It’s mint, mate! It’s mint, mate!’”
After five years, Jonny and his friend Joshua Burke thought about doing something else. They considered speed dating, but bingo was what they landed on, and Bongo’s Bingo was born. Jonny just substituted calling out quiz questions with calling out numbers and it was immediately massive: “Bingo is more accessible – anyone can play.”
There’s been ups and downs. The show’s popularity meant that other venues in other cities quickly came calling – Manchester, Newcastle, Leeds – and Jonny wanted to host the shows, so at one point he was doing five nights a week, up and down the country. That almost killed him, so he relinquished control and now there are 18 different Bongo show teams in the UK, with hosts and dancers, all trained.
They don’t franchise the show, so everything about Bongo’s Bingo is run by Jonny and the company. Jonny came up with the show and has kept true to a lot of the original concepts. “Whatever’s put through on the door, we give away as prize money,” he says. “So tonight we’re giving away £4,000 to £5,000 worth of prizes.”
The company fought a court case in 2019, when the original venue, Camp and Furnace – just down the road – claimed ownership of the concept. They won the case, left that venue and set up at Content. (Camp and Furnace has its own fun bingo now, I note, as I walk past: Bingo Lingo. There are plenty of other imitators out there.) And they kept growing. Now, they employ 120 people and the annual turnover is in the millions.
Back inside the hall, things are revving up. It’s 10.12pm. Kathryn is on the bingo books. She has five in front of her. We use small Argos-style red pens: the usual blob markers are no good at Bongo’s Bingo because, when things go mad, the ink goes everywhere.
At some point we are showered in Coco Pops. At another, Susie dresses up as the marshmallow man from Ghostbusters and does some hip-hop moves. Alan Titchmarsh/Marty McFly gets on stage and throws shapes for quite some time. There’s a late 80s/90s rave section, which I find very strange: Blue Monday followed by Frankie Knuckles’s Your Love is hard for me to get my head around in this context. At Bongo’s Bingo, every track is on a cultural level: there’s no difference between the Beastie Boys’ Intergalactic, Billie Joel’s Uptown Girl and David Guetta’s mix of Alphaville’s Forever Young. Everything is judged by whether you can bellow out the words while dancing.
All at once, it’s 11pm. We’ve won nothing. We don’t care. The beautiful D&G girl has her head on the table. Her friend gets her up and out. Later, as I walk back to my hotel, I pass them on the bypass, near McDonald’s. “I don’t even know where I am!” shouts D&G. Ellie sends me a DM and some photos. She and Bethany carried on to Modo in the centre of Liverpool. “I can’t believe you did that whole night sober!” she writes. I think if I’d been drinking, I might have had a cardiac arrest.
This week, on 7 March and 8 March, Bongo’s Bingo is celebrating its 10th anniversary with two huge shows – 3,500 people each night – at the Exhibition Centre in Liverpool. Simon and Lee from Blue are appearing, as are N-Trance and the Cheeky Girls. Over the past 10 years, Bongo’s Bingo has welcomed more than 5 million people and given out thousands and thousands of prizes. Honestly, I recommend it. It’s like an injection of sunshine, a dose of daftness – amiable, silly, fun. And all done and home – if you remember where you are – by midnight.
