Following their fifth birthday bash at Floridita, Saturday's Gay Bingo was the last one for a while, and the last ever at the ICA. It had a 3D theme – specs were dished out; Jonny Woo used his patter to develop a mantra about drag queens actually being three-dimensional human beings, if you hadn't realised; there was a 70s-ish porn-ish vid with Jonny, John Sizzle and Ma Butcher up to stereoscopic excesses; and a skeleton, a stiletto and an inflatable beehive were dangled over the crowd on fishing lines for that genuine in-yer-face experience.
Not that the theme's really the point, of course. It's about the looks, the numbers, the crowd – and, incidentally, the fact that bingo calling is a subset of the peculiarly English tradition of nonsense-speak that Jonny often draws on – Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, Pam Ayres. Listening to him improvise quickfire stories out of a sequence of numbers made me want to hear him do a cattle auction. Or the shipping forecast.
Numberswise, it's all about the 69 – when it's called, it's on, and one lucky punter will shortly be spread-eagled on a table covered in drag queen. When John Sizzle got busy with a boy and a bottle, the soberly dressed New York history professor opposite me got a genuine in-yer-face experience she hadn't expected. See the full flickr set...
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