If you watch sport on TV you will have seen the endlessly rotated gambling adverts featuring The Ladbrokes Life guys. The guys themselves are a closeknit group of charismatic “Betting Men” with interlocking but nonetheless very distinct and complex characters. There’s the Professor, leader of the pack, who has a beard and a mind like a high-powered computer. In one scene the Professor does millions of whirring calculations in his head before successfully suggesting salsa lessons as a present for his girlfriend’s mum. Just like an actual professor.
Then there’s the Gut Truster, the Professor’s right-hand man but also his shadowy reflection. The Gut Truster spits with fury when someone offers him a form guide. He is instead a creature of pure instinct, a symbol of intellectual, even spiritual, freedom. My own favourite is Mr Brightside. Extrovert, hedonistic, Mr Brightside is the man you might have been, the man you could still become, a seeker, a searcher, one of those who in Kerouac’s phrase, “burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles”. Basically, Mr Brightside is really, really excited about betting.
Yet it turns out this is actually quite a sad time to be talking about the Ladbrokes Life guys. So far there has been a bit of a media blackout on this. And rightly so. It is an upsetting story. But the fact is since making that series of adverts every single one of the Ladbrokes Life guys has, very sadly, died.
The Professor. The Gut Truster. Generous John. Every one of them, very tragically, dead. Some have already compared it to the “curse” that hit the film The Exorcist in the 1970s. All we really know for sure is that we will never, ever see them ever again. Because they are all, particularly Mr Brightside, tragically dead.
It does at least make the adverts extra poignant. At times I find myself quietly welling up watching the larking and japing of the Ladbrokes Life guys now we know they are, every last one of them, tragically dead. Those ledges. Those epic ledges. Fallen warriors of banter. Now all so very dead. Particularly, and I can’t emphasise this enough, Mr Brightside.
Actually reading that back it may not be true in its entirety. It’s possible I may have imagined or dreamed some parts, in particular the bit about them all being sadly dead. It might be worth Googling that. What is certain is the message of the Ladbrokes guys remains very much alive. And that message is that the industry continues to colonise huge parts of the sporting periphery, and that Big Bookmaking is currently shoved right up against professional sport’s cheek, rifling its pockets, gurgling in its ear, casting the tone and texture of the occasion in its own image.
The last few years have experienced a furiously sweaty consummation of this relationship. Only this week Andy Murray criticised tennis authorities that have begun to broker major deals with gambling companies (William Hill is the new sponsor of the Australian Open). In football, betting companies have been capering at the edge of your eyeline for years, Ray Winstone’s giant severed head looming above the lip of the stand like a vast scowling Zeppelin barking odds and deals and spreads, embedding still further the idea that this is simply the new norm now, hammering the glorious details of sport into just another relentlessly commodified substance.
There are some familiar objections to this. The human cost of Total Gambling Overload, for example. One survey has suggested three million UK adults are at risk of becoming “problem gamblers”, and whatever the truth of this the click-click-boom of adrenal, constantly available markets is a potent lure.
Plus betting shops themselves are an urban blight. Deregulation has helped them cluster in poorer areas. Some will say objections to this are simply snobbery. That this is what poor people want and must therefore have: betting shops, chicken shops, cheap booze, that golden trio currently blocking out a nobly disadvantaged town centre near you. One bookies in my high street has a group of ragged-haired regulars who have chosen, as empowered consumers, to stand outside all day drinking from the purple tin, barking, meowing, rolling shopping trollies about and having slow motion fist-fights. Just living out that Ladbrokes Life, eh boys?
But really there isn’t any need to look this far. My own main objection to Total Betting Overload is simply a sporting one. Watching sport, as opposed to playing it, is by nature a parasitic business. Wall-to-wall gambling is just another layer of parasitism, another step into the aggressively monetised “life-styling” of something that is at its best a pure passion: absorbing, infuriating, but essentially uplifting and benevolent.
This is the real point about the Ladbrokes Life guys, those zombified goons who are – sadly, tragically – probably not dead after all. This is what Big Gambling really thinks of you as a punter and all-round sports mug. This is what they’d like you to be for them: gargoyles, caricatures, captive consumers, another note in the cretinising white noise of retailing Big Sport. Gambling is the most visible strand of this, a bullying, cash-hungry industry that should be treated a bit like smoking, a vice to be catered for, not encouraged. But which has, inexplicably, been given the best seat in the house.
