So after old cinemas like the one in The Smallest Show on Earth, it's an old bingo hall - and on the drabbest bit of Welsh coast, too - that's in peril from rising damp and declining patrons and must be saved from losing its business to the ritzy rival, the high-tech health-and-games club along the promenade, by its Dickensian MC (Freddie Jones), star caller (Jason Hughes) and loyal barmaid (Kelly MacDonald).
All looks lost, despite giveaway prizes like a stand-up ashtray, until Macdonald discovers a talent for predicting the next number to come up.
The Ealing spirit hangs like a mothballed shroud over Julian Kemp's debut feature; but things improve with the appearance of acid-tongued Miriam Margolyes as an avaricious aunt and pugnacious Mossie Smith as a waitress who could balance the tray on her cleavage. The direction is "flash", with whip pans and zooms, but the cast manage to generate a breakthrough mood of good-companionship that wrings quite a surprising quota of chuckles from a sedentary pursuit like bingo. Had the "bingo culture" of this dog-end Welsh community been more scrupulously examined with the social sympathies of, say, The Full Monty, it might have amounted to more than just a whimsical museum-piece.
The National Lottery contributed £350,000 (out of a budget total of £2,070,000). Ironically, it looks exactly the sort of film - small, derivative and telly-centric - whose number will be up when the new blueprint for British film financing, rolled out this week, is put into effect: thus a film about gambling part-financed by money from gambling falls victim to Culture Secretary Chris Smith's gamble with film industry financing.
House!
Cert: 15
