Gala TV
Gala TV was a British interactive bingo television channel operated by the Gala Coral Group, which broadcast on Sky from 4 October 2006 until 1 April 2011. For twenty-four hours a day it offered viewers the chance to play bingo along with live, presenter-led games from their own sofas, registering and buying tickets through their television remote controls and telephones. The channel was created with the entertainment producer Endemol UK, launched on Sky channel 841 and later found at channel 861, and it grew directly out of Avago, the pioneering interactive gaming channel that Gala Coral bought at the end of 2005. Gala TV was a deliberate response to a changing Britain: with smoking bans threatening the economics of the country's bingo halls, the nation's largest bingo operator took the game onto television. The satellite channel closed in 2011, although the Gala TV name continued afterwards as an online bingo service within GalaBingo.com.
Origins in Avago
Gala TV cannot be understood without its predecessor. Avago, its name a play on "have a go", was a gaming television channel in the United Kingdom and Ireland launched on 4 July 2002. Viewers played its games by pressing the red button on their Sky remote. Its main game was Avago Balls, a live, interactive, presenter-led bingo show in which players played along through their televisions, supported by a stable of other games: Roulette, the roulette-style Spin 2 Win with a new spin every minute around the clock, Avago Instants, Super Bingo Keno, Cash Keno, the racing game Trackside, which ran all day and all night, and Big Shuffle, a live card game in which viewers bet on whether the next card turned would be higher or lower. Contemporary trade reporting in 2003 described Avago as one of the early success stories of interactive television on satellite, with more than 77,000 registered players, over 650 winners a day and revenues approaching £15 million a year, growing at around 15 per cent a month. Avago had proved that televised gaming could work; what it lacked was a major gambling brand behind it.
Gala Coral buys Avago
That brand arrived on 22 December 2005, when Yoomedia announced the sale of Avago to the gambling operator Gala Coral in a deal reported to be worth £5.1 million. The plan was for the channel to be rebranded as a Gala bingo service in the third quarter of 2006. Gala Coral was then Britain's largest private gaming company, and its Gala Bingo division was the country's dominant bingo operator, with around five million members on its books in the years that followed and, by 2008, 137 clubs and roughly a quarter of all British bingo clubs. For Gala, the purchase bought an established interactive television operation — the technology, the registered player base and the presenting team — rather than a bare channel slot. Of the Avago presenters, only Liv Kennard carried over to the new Gala TV; the longest-serving Avago presenters, including Mark Pell, Jemish Patel, Charlotte Gane and Lawrie Jordan, and Colin Murnane, host of its biggest prize giveaways, belong to the predecessor channel's history.
Launch on 4 October 2006
Gala TV launched on 4 October 2006, described by its owner as Gala Bingo's first live interactive bingo channel, made in association with Endemol UK, the production company behind many of British television's biggest entertainment formats. The channel was available twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week on Sky channel 841, and its centrepiece was eight hours of live, presenter-led bingo every day between 5pm and 1am. Existing players at Galabingo.co.uk did not have to re-register to play on Gala TV, while new members could register through their remote control, an integration between the group's online and television services that was advanced for 2006. It had been planned for the channel also to launch on Virgin Media's cable network, then still known as NTL, but that launch never happened: Gala TV remained a Sky service, also available on Freesat and streamed online. Its guide position later moved, and it was listed at Sky channel 861 by the time of its closure.
Why bingo came to television: the smoking ban context
The launch was widely understood in the industry as a pre-emptive strike. Bingo clubs across Britain faced the arrival of the smoking ban, which came into full effect in England in 2007 and had already been introduced in Scotland in April 2006. The Bingo Association reported that in Scotland operators had seen revenues fall by between 17 and 26 per cent, with players arriving later and leaving earlier. For an operator whose halls depended on long, sociable sessions, the threat was serious. Gala's response, as its e-commerce development manager Chris Drake explained at launch, was to give players another option for enjoying the game: they could go to bingo clubs, play online, and now play on television. Gala Coral presented the channel as one arm of a single membership spanning more than 1,500 retail trading outlets in the United Kingdom and an e-commerce division, in a group employing more than 17,000 people. Television bingo was not a novelty sideline; it was insurance for the core business.
How viewers played
The viewing and playing experience was built around participation. Outside the live hours, the channel ran continuously, but between 5pm and 1am presenters led the games in person, calling the numbers, talking to players and filling the screen with the names and progress of those taking part. A registered viewer's tickets were tied to their Gala account, the same account used at Galabingo.co.uk, so a player could move between the website and the television without opening a second membership. Registration through the remote control removed the need for a computer altogether, an important consideration for bingo's traditional audience in 2006, many of whom were more comfortable with a television and a telephone than with a website. The presenters' role was essential rather than decorative: in a game where the viewer at home held a ticket but could not touch the draw, the presenter was the human guarantee that the game was live, fair and shared with thousands of other players, recreating something of the atmosphere of the bingo hall that the channel was designed to complement.
Broadcasting operation and the Arqiva deal
Behind the scenes, Gala TV was a substantial broadcast operation. In January 2008 Arqiva, the transmission and broadcast services group, announced that it had signed a three-year deal with Gala Limited to provide uplinking services for the channel. Arqiva's Satellite Media Solutions division noted that it had worked with Gala indirectly over the years and understood what the live interactive service required. Uplinking — sending the finished channel to the satellite for distribution to Sky homes — was the invisible foundation of the service, and a three-year commitment, signed fifteen months after launch, indicated that Gala regarded the channel as an established part of its business rather than an experiment. The deal covered the channel through to the beginning of 2011, close to the end of its life on satellite.
Gala TV and the wider Gala business
The channel sat inside a bingo business at the height of its scale. Gala Bingo in this period had millions of members, of whom around 1.2 million were active players, and its clubs recorded an average of some 600,000 admissions a week. The division joined the Nectar loyalty scheme in June 2007, awarding points for club admissions and, from September 2007, for slot machine play, a first for the bingo industry. In July 2007 a Gala player, Pauline Clarke, aged 62, became the company's first millionaire through its games, winning a tie-break against another online player — the kind of story the television channel existed to multiply, by putting big, presenter-fronted prize moments in front of a home audience. Gala TV's role within the group was to bind these worlds together: the club member, the online player and the television viewer were, as far as Gala Coral was concerned, the same customer on different evenings.
Closure in April 2011
Gala TV closed on 1 April 2011, after four and a half years on air. It left the Sky guide at channel 861, its passing recorded in the listings of former UK channels alongside a cluster of other services that ended in the same spring. No single dramatic cause was announced; the channel's closure belonged to a wider pattern in which interactive television gaming migrated decisively to the internet and the mobile phone, where the same player account could be served at far lower cost than a twenty-four-hour satellite channel with studios, presenters and uplinking contracts. The bingo business behind it also changed beyond recognition in the following years: Gala Coral merged with Ladbrokes in 2016, while the Gala Bingo clubs themselves had been sold to Caledonia Investments in December 2015 for £241 million, and the clubs were later rebranded as Buzz Bingo. The television channel, tied to the era when the group owned halls, betting shops, casinos and an online business under one roof, did not survive that unbundling.
The name after the channel
The Gala TV name did not die with the satellite channel. Within GalaBingo.com, Gala TV continued as an online television-style bingo room, and in September 2014 the operator announced that Gala TV had been made available on its tablet service. In that later form, the Gala TV room was open daily from 4.30pm to 1am, with jackpot games through the evening and a live interactive show from 7pm to midnight featuring celebrity guests, chat and topical entertainment alongside the bingo. The continuity was more than nominal: the online room kept the core idea of 2006 — bingo presented as a live television show that the audience plays rather than merely watches — while discarding the satellite channel that had originally carried it. It was a fitting destination for a format born in interactive television's first decade.
Legacy
Gala TV was the most ambitious attempt by a major British gambling operator to turn television itself into a bingo hall. It took a proven interactive channel in Avago, a heavyweight production partner in Endemol, and the membership of the country's largest bingo business, and combined them into a round-the-clock service with eight hours of live presentation a day. Its launch captured a genuine strategic moment, as the smoking ban forced the bingo industry to reinvent where its game was played, and for several years it gave players three ways into the same account: the club, the website and the television. That it closed in 2011, and survived mainly as a feature inside a website, says less about the format's failure than about where interactive gaming was heading. Gala TV demonstrated the demand; the internet inherited it.
