The Voice of the Balls

The national lottery started in the UK back on 19th November 1994. Mum was interested enough to want to buy a ticket. In those days I think this involved filling out some coupon, marking a line through the numbers you wanted to select and then handing it across to the newsagent or shop assistant to run it through a lottery terminal.

However it worked, it was not at first sight that obvious, and so that was why I volunteered to purchase a ticket for my mum. I also bought one for myself. Her numbers were based on specific dates – the birthdays of her children, the last two digits of her date of birth. Standard ways of picking numbers. Numbers that locked you in, because every week you’d know soon enough if your numbers came up. They were easily remembered.

That’s how they got you. That’s how you ended up having to play each week.

I selected my numbers more randomly. I pulled out a record from my – at the time – large vinyl collection. Not a specific album, just the first that came to hand. It happened to be Jehovakill by Julian Cope – a beautifully designed, not quite double album in a gatefold sleeve. 3 sides of vinyl with music on them and a 4^th side that had a drawing of the famous stone circle formation at Callanish (Isle of Lewis) etched into the vinyl. I picked appropriate numbers based on the barcode attached to the rear cover of the record.

It’s safe to say I wouldn’t remember those numbers for years to come. Or even a week later.

I don’t think my dad was interested in the lottery, although he did shortly inherit the weekly task of purchasing tickets for my mum. He had been a keen participant in the football pools a decade earlier. I suppose this was considered a slightly more sophisticated form of micro gambling, as there was an element of skill in trying to pick which football matches would end in a score draw.

Each week, me and my dad would pour over the coupon and try to work out where the draws would come. On a Thursday the pools man came to collect our coupon and the pennies it cost to enter. The pools man (later I think it became his daughter, who I inevitably developed a crush on), seems like one of those mythic creatures of a lost past. Like the bread man in his van. Or the insurance guy, collecting your payments and marking them up in a little lined red book.

We never won anything on the pools. You could win on the lottery though. Three numbers from your selection of six would win you a tenner. You never won the big prize of course.

(Or did you? Although I personally only entered that first week, I was part of a work syndicate back when I worked in the tax office. We never won, but I have a vague feeling another group from our office did. It may be a false memory, but it’s nagging somewhere at the back of mind that there’s a story to tell in all this … but I can’t recall the details.)

Once I left Southend and my job at the tax office, I never did the lottery again. The slogan back then was, ‘it could be you’. It was unlikely, but it was sold on that promise. But I wasn’t sold on it. I didn’t buy a ticket. It most certainly could NOT be me.

*

In Bristol I had a job working for an overseas development charity called ActionAid. When I first started working there, most of the people were volunteers. Retired ladies who did house to house collections. But charities were evolving around this time. House to house collections were cumbersome to oversee. There was a lot of admin for not much return. Organisations were moving over to trying to persuade their supporters to make a monthly standing order donation. Less admin, more of a guaranteed income stream, allowing them to better plan for the long term work they did.

Another way in which ActionAid looked to raise money was by having their own lottery. By now the original national lottery had been running for about 4 years or so and it had been hugely successful. Naturally other people looked at that and wanted a bit of the action. Every Friday ActionAid made their weekly draw and for anyone that wanted to find out the results, there was a number you could dial up to hear the results. (Again, that’s how things worked in these pre-internet days, you couldn’t just look stuff up).

At the time this lottery launched, we had an office manager called Richard who had previously been manager of a Midlands branch of Radio Rentals. This was another way in which the charity sector was changing – out went the volunteers and the vaguely hippyish guys in woollen jumpers and in came business professionals. I spent five years in Bristol within this industry and I saw all the changes. Some made sense and were undoubtedly for the better in terms of making things more efficient and cost effective, but some not so much. When charity became a career path rather than a vocation… well it didn’t always make for the best results.

But that’s another story.

Although ActionAid had a head office in a small Somerset town, our office in Bristol handled all the telecoms side of things. We were given the job of recording a weekly message giving out the winning numbers and also explaining how people could get involved, what the money was being used for etc. Each Friday, as soon as the results and a script had been faxed through, Richard would pick one of the many young students who worked part time with us to record this message. It was always a female voice. This was not a decree from on high, this was just his personal view that a female voice was nicer to listen to.

He would select someone and then they would spend an hour or two laboriously going through the script, making multiple takes until they had got it word perfect - with no gaps or pauses or mistakes. It seemed unnecessarily complicated and having different people each week just added to that.

After a few weeks, unsurprisingly, Richard lost his enthusiasm for the job and delegated it down the chain. It fell upon myself and my friend Jon (he of the playing bass for local Bristol band Shelbyville) to take over the role. We immediately dispensed with selecting random young women and training them up to read the  script. We did it ourselves.

Jon also worked on Saturday evenings as one of the presenters on the Bristol equivalent of one of those BBC local radio youth shows I talked about, so he was more than competent at reading out a script. Similarly I’d already recorded some sample fundraising calls a year before when ActionAid were nominated for an award at the annual ICF - Institute of Charity Fundraisers - awards. (We won the award, presented at Warwick University, and my recording was played at the event – although myself and my partner in that session (Sarah) didn’t get to go to the awards, only the marketing team. For all our efforts, all we got was a bottle of cheap red wine).

Anyway, between me and Jon, one of us would record the message each week (the script usually ran to about 3 minutes) and we took pride in the fact that most times we could do it in a single take. No fuss. No faff. Job done.

There is a famous voiceover guy - Alan Dedicoat – who became known as ‘the voice of the balls’ for his work on the BBC show where they would announce the lottery numbers every Saturday night. In some small way, I liked to think, I was performing the same role for ActionAid. I guess you take whatever little moments of fame you can lay claim to! Of course no one ever stopped me in the street upon hearing my voice to enquire if I was the guy who read out the lottery numbers for ActionAid.

At some point they stopped getting us to record those weekly messages. I guess eventually it was simply posted online, but by then I’d exited the world of charities and headed down from Bristol to Cornwall.

(If you want to know more about those five years working within the charity fundraising industry (and yes, it was an industry) then you might get to read about it somewhere else on here. )