The second comes today in the news that it is Simon Mayo that has been awarded the presenters role, even though there are the enormous shoes of original host, the late Bob Holness, to fill.

Simon Mayo is best known as a radio DJ, originally on Radio 1 and currently hosting the Radio 2 Drivetime show.His past attempts at TV have not been that successful.

While there are tried and trusted presenters that might have been given the job, Simon has proved a hit with the Radio 2 audience and it is judged that the time is right to try TV again.

The new Blockbusters show will air on Challenge TV in the next couple of months and there may even be a celebrity version eventually.

The publicity will certainly not do any harm to Mecca Bingo, who have the exclusive rights to the fast paced and unique Blockbusters Bingo Game. Check it out at Mecca Bingo and if joining for the first time get a 100% cash match worth up to £50 to play.

I always loved Blockbusters as a kid and I hope that Simon can do it justice – he certainly has a hard act to follow, even if the show is not being aired on the mainstream TV channels in the first instance.

40 episodes if an all new Blockbusters have been commissioned by Talkback Thames and the show will be broadcast on Challenge TV. Challenge TV have been testing the water by running the old shows, but one fundamental change that has been made is that this will be a Blockbusters that will feature adult players and not schoolkids.

The childish innocence was part of the charm of the original show, but most are so streetwise these days that would probably be lost anyway. Many of the adults that will be on the show will probably remember it from first time round and some may have also featured on it – that would make a great story for the channel.

Within the online bingo world there is only one site that saw the writing on the wall for this brand a couple of years ago when they introduced a unique Blockbusters based bingo game. That site was Mecca Bingo and as you would not expect the format of the new show to change too much from the original they should be on to a winner.

The Mecca Bingo Blockbusters game is fast and furious as of course there are only 26 letters in the alphabet and players only need to get four or five to win a line. No chance to get bored in the Blockbusters room.

It is a shame that the confirmation of the all new Blockbusters had to come so close to the death of the iconic host of the original Blockbusters, Bob Holness, but hopefully the new show will be a fitting tribute to what he created all those years ago.

Of course, I have colleagues who use it a lot more than I do and they do tend to search around and find out what brings readers to WhichBingo. The natural choices crop up a lot as you would expect given our speciality – no deposit bingo, bingo sites, new bingo sites and the brand names like Jackpotjoy and Foxy Bingo and Mecca Bingo (plus dozens more).

However, every now and again a search term just jumps out from the page and makes you think ‘how did they ever find us by typing in that’, or ‘why on earth would they type that in to Google’ (or wherever, other search engines are available!).

That happened this month and someone found WhichBingo and paid us a visit by searching for the term ‘tombola winners are all Geordies’!

Could it be that they were implying that because tombola Bingo is based in the North East it somehow favours people from that area? Hardly likely, given that a little research goes to show that tombola is based in Sunderland and Geordies actually hail from Newcastle that is 14.4 miles away and there is no love lost between the two areas at the best of times, especially if we are talking football. tombola Bingo even sponsors the Premier League side Sunderland FC.

It’s highly unlikely that the majority of tombola winners are Geordies given the nationwide nature of the player base at this popular bingo site.

This is one discovery that made us smile and as such we will be on the lookout for more weird and wonderful WhichBingo searches in the coming months.

I am looking after a friend’s house while they are on holiday and within hours of them leaving the alarm started going off. I’d go round, check everything was ok and reset it – not being able to see anything that might have triggered it. This happened about four times. Later that day I heard noises and went round to find a relative had also been tasked with overseeing the property. When I explained about the alarm they calmly said “Oh, that’s all right, it’ll be that flippin’ ghost again.”

I looked for the grin that would say this was a joke, but there was none. Now we live in a suburban semi, so it’s not what you expect to hear as a possible explanation.

Anyway, no sooner had I finished telling the guys in the office about this than I got further spooked as the next bingo piece I read was about a seance in a Mecca Bingo club to flush out another ghost. Spooky or what?

It is thought that the Mecca Bingo club in Rosehill has a ‘Grey Man’ ghost and members of The Ghost Club tried to contact him recently, with they believe some measure of success as the club is housed in a Grade II listed building from the 30′s and they experienced ‘unexplained sounds and bright lights’.

Of course, buildings don’t need to be old to be haunted, so gamers may be happier playing online bingo in their own home. Mecca Bingo is one of the most popular online bingo sites out there, so give that a try if you think there might be other presences at your local bingo hall than fellow bingo players.

You can have all the fun of a huge selection of bingo games and play Cashline bingo too. You don’t need to wait for a break to play slots as you can access them at the same time as you play from the comfort of your own armchair and the scariest thing you might come across is a spider running across the floor, lol.

Coming soon????

Gary Barlow has once again got out his bingo balls on the Progress Tour to help everyone relax backstage. It’s not the first time he has done this and bingo even made up part of his wedding anniversary celebrations last year. I wonder if he will try it on the X Factor crew too?

I know that the Take That boys are not as young as they were the first time round, but when the wildest thing they seem to be getting up to before and after shows is a good old game of bingo you have to wonder if maybe all the hard work is taking too much of a toll.

Personally I’m thrilled that Gary has once again proved his affection for my favourite game and really think someone needs to approach him quick to set up Barlows Bingo, as he calls it,  as an online bingo site. Can you imagine the numbers that would flock to that site and the exclusive prizes it could offer.

It would certainly put Cheggers Bingo to shame and would it really be worthwhile any other online bingo site even bothering with any kind of celebrity endorsement to try and compete with that? Maybe if Robbie Williams splits away from the band again and set up in competition with a site of his own – that would be good for a laugh.

Gary is said to like a nice bit of new technology and has given everyone on the tour a gift of a Samsung tablet computer as a thank you, so maybe he could set up a mobile bingo game to rival that of Mecca Bingo as his primary function and then go for a big online launch, rather than the other way around.

If he did decide to do it I for one would be there like a shot and surely someone as commercially savvy as Gary Barlow will not miss an opportunity like this. It must just be a matter of deciding which provider to go with from all the ones that will be knocking at his door.

I’ll work for your online bingo site Gary, just give me a call…..sorry boss!!!

You may have heard of the Grand National and The Derby, but did you know that there was a horserace called the ‘Play Mecca Bingo on your iPhone Handicap’?

No, me neither. I thought this might be a one off that Mecca Bingo had managed to blag somehow through a friend of a friend at the racecourse, but one of the guys in the office that knows about these things says this is not an unusual occurance.

So, I took him at his word (or really because I didn’t believe him!!), and took a look at the paper to see the rest of the races on the card at Ayr the same day. Do you know what, it made hilarious reading. See what you think:

2.50 Download the Blue Square App Handicap
3.20 Join Bluesq.com for £20 Free Bets Handicap
3.50 Play Mecca Bingo on your iPhone Handicap
4.20 Weddings at Western House Hotel Handicap
4.50 Bet at Bluesq.com Handicap

and finally at 5.20 – wait for it – See Stacey Solomon Here on 17th June Handicap

Maybe Foxy Bingo had a hand in the last one, lol. (Stacey is the Foxy Bingo Celeb Mum of the Year 2011)

All credit to Rank and Mecca Bingo for getting the brands and the fact that you can now go mobile out there, but as they say, you really couldn’t make it up.

New Bingo Game

So we have some new stuff to report in the online bingo world with news of the Lucky Numbers game being launched on Virtue Fusion bingo sites. We normally get some advance warning when a new game is going to be released, but not this time – it just appeared on almost all the sites at the same time.

Often it will just be the sportsbook bingo sites that run with new stuff, like Paddy Power Bingo and Ladbrokes and William Hill Bingo, but this time a quick check of the network shows even the less prominent sites such as Beacon Bingo and Jackpot Bingo have all introduced the game. It is a good idea, offering bingo players extra chances to win as it does, but a lot of players will have noticed that, in fact, the concept is not that new.

What really surprises me is that Mecca Bingo are running the game as it is identical in concept to the Britain’s Got Talent game that is supposedly unique and exclusive to them. You would think that if they paid towards the development of an exclusive game they would not want to see the same game everywhere else, just with a different theme and colour scheme.

Of course, Lucky Numbers does not have a TV tie in, but the game itself is the same so there is no longer any extra reason to visit Mecca Bingo over any of the other VF bingo sites to play a unique bingo game. If anything the new game will take revenue away from the Britain’s Got Talent game.

A new game we may have and it gives an extra dimension and some variety to the offering a lot of bingo sites. This might be an extra reason for some people to keep playing a bit longer, but each site having the same offering still means that they must come up with some really good offers to keep us going through the doors – I don’t suppose that is a bad thing.

Let’s hope next time we see something genuinely brand new.

Lucky Numbers Game

Britain's Got Talent at Mecca

Simon & Cheryl off to X Factor USA

Simon Cowell knows how to make good TV programmes, but he also knows how to make sure those shows make headlines and generate even more viewers. In the past week the multi-millionaire music mogul has hardly been out of the newspapers and he helps them to generate more sales too as people want to know what he is doing next. That of course helps newspapers sell advertising and get more people aware of associated business, think The Sun Newspaper and The Daily Mirror and the Daily Mail, all of whom have an associated online bingo offering.

The week started with news that Simon Cowell is keen to bring back the late lamented Top of the Pops, but not just for the UK, he wants it to go global. Of course he does, the more countries you can sell a programme to the better and they are more likely to buy it if the acts are global superstars.

We already know that he has made American Idol a success on the back of the UK Pop Idol and it has just been revealed that Cheryl Cole has secured a job on the judging panel of the all new X Factor USA that is due to be launched this weekend. Whether the UK X Factor will maintain the success of previous years without Simon and Cheryl remains to be seen, but my view is that the next UK series will probably the last as the main driving force focusses on America.

Online bingo sites have cause to worry about these kind of things as many sites have spent a lot of money developing themed bingo games or slot games to tie in with these successful programmes. The X Factor Slot is one of the most popular at many sites such as Mecca Bingo and Virgin Bingo.

Of course Simon Cowell is also the drving force behind yet another new show launching soon called Red or Black that has a potential daily prize of £1 million, but in which the likelihood of any money being given away is virtually nil. No doubt we will see a Red or Black themed game arriving shortly at a bingo site near you, based as it is on the simplest of roulette bets.

Simon has also suddenly become very vocal in his support of this season of Britain’s Got Talent which is said to be losing viewers quickly as it misses his presence. The demise of this programme in particular would affect many bingo sites, especially Mecca Bingo which has the exclusive Britain’s Got Talent bingo game based solely round the format of the show itself. Also new bingo site Britain’s Got Bingo leans heavily on the BGT link in its colour scheme and the fact that it has launched at the same time as the new series of the show.

You would think that the revenue that all these shows generate would be enough to keep Mr Cowell in the style to which he has become accustomed, but in even more newspaper column inches devoted to the man, it was revealed that he still buys the occasional lottery ticket in the hope of winning big. I think this is a good indication of why so many people take a gamble now and again – no matter what we have, the thrill of a win is still an exciting prospect.

Bingo players of course can get lottery tickets for free at Rollover Bingo and bet365 bingo, that are earned while playing bingo online at those sites, so no need to be mega rich to take part like Simon. I don’t think we will ever top the rich lists like Simon, but it is good fun trying.

Great Offer

It’s been reported in a lot of quarters that although we have just enjoyed a lovely long weekend during which the weather wasn’t that warm and that saw lots of people glued to their armchairs, online bingo sites were not as well populated as would have been expected.

To be fair online bingo has had quite a lot to battle against in recent days. Boredom is a good reason to reach for the laptop for an exciting game of bingo. However, events have transpired that meant many people were far from bored. It has been the most newsworthy few days for months. So although millions had enforced holidays, they didn’t want to miss a bit of THE wedding that was far more interesting than many expected, terrorist leader Osama Bin Laden was shot dead and sporting legends Henry Cooper and Ted Lowe died.

In addition many people decided to get together with friends and spend time with family. All very commendable, but supposedly detrimental to the online bingo world.

Well, I logged on quite a few times over the weekend to different sites and I found lots of people taking full advantage of the myriad offers that we had been told about in the weeks leading up to the wedding.

One of the biggest was the William Hill Bingo £10k daily giveaway. This alone saw the Community Room at the site more populated than ever before, reaching a peak of nearly 500 players when the ball count hit 50 numbers every day. Unfortunately I am not one of the lucky people that is £5,000 richer, but I did benefit from about £27 in free bingo bonus from the consolation £5,000 every day I took part and was playing when the jackpot was won – that’s not bad. I will be using some of those funds to be in the free bingo room tonight that’s for sure if Superbooks are available.

The Mecca Bingo, Gala Bingo and tombola bingo offers were also well populated, so thanks guys, I for one had a lot of fun with you this weekend – playing between ironing, gardening and watching TV you helped keep me sane, if a little poorer. Never mind, there’s always next time. Keep up the good work.

I’m now hard at work looking for the next best thing in online bingo – if you see something you’d like to share be sure to tell us.

Pink Bingo is also the third bingo site to actually have the word pink in the title and excessive use of the colour pink on the site. Why do online bingo providers think that because they want to target their bingo offering at women that it has to be in pink? There are lots of other colours that appeal – don’t be lazy, do some research.

The other ‘pink’ titled sites are Pink Ladies Bingo and Pink Ribbon Bingo. Of the three I feel that only Pink Ribbon is justified due to its link with Breakthrough Breast Cancer and the fact that a portion of its take is donated directly to that charity.

The other big player that relies heavily on the pink is Mecca Bingo, but again this brand can be forgiven as it was the first and it has always been the corporate colour of the Mecca brand, even at its land based clubs.

Off the top of my head, players familiar with Foxy Bingo, Party Bingo, Think Bingo, KissMyBingo and Bobs Bingo may all think that there is no other colour allowed for online bingo sites to use.

So, we know there are another five or six new bingo sites in the pipeline, probably before Christmas, and I only hope that they are inclined to bring something new to the table. I want something different and exciting to write about and to play on.

Do you agree? Comments welcome.