Celebrity Bingo Lovers

Top Celebrity Bingo Lovers

For years, bingo has been considered a people’s pastime – a world away from the pretensions and airs of the celebrity merry-go-round. Yet, as it turns out, there are quite a few celebs with a bingo connection – some of which you may find surprising in the extreme. So, just remember that next time you are playing online bingo, you might just be sharing a chat room with Celebrity Bingo Lovers!

Russell Crowe

Muscle-bound anger merchant Russell Crowe may have shot to fame in the early 2000s with acclaimed roles in films such as Gladiator and The Insider, but his life hasn’t always been flecked with stardust. As a skinny young man in his native Australia, Russell tried and failed at a number of jobs, including a stint as a bingo caller. His natural charisma and dramatic talents made him a natural fit for the role, but he was later fired for offending the customers with his increasingly rude bingo calls. Shortly after his dismissal, he won a role in a stage musical called Bad Boy Johnny and the Prophets of Doom and the rest, as they say, is history.

Barbara Windsor

Babs first entered the limelight in a string of comedic roles in the Carry On movies, alongside the likes of Kenneth Williams, Sid James, and Hattie Jaques. Having appeared in several of these movies throughout the 60s and 70s, she became typecast and her career foundered as a result. It was revived in the mid-90s when she landed the role of Peggy Mitchell in the British soap opera Eastenders, the landlady of the Queen Vic pub and the mother of local gangsters Grant and Phil Mitchell. After leaving the cast for good in the late 2000s, her next prominent role was as the ‘Queen of Bingo’ in advertisements for the popular bingo and gaming website Jackpotjoy.

Gary Barlow

The world of pop music can be a fickle one. Back in the early 90s, Barlow was riding high as the ‘talented one’ in the UK’s biggest boy band, Take That. Having written several of their hits, including the smash ‘Back for Good’, it was expected that Gary would go on to enjoy George Michael-style solo success. Unfortunately for him, fellow Take That member Robbie Williams had the same idea, and left the group early in an ultimately successful bid for solo glory. After a couple of moderate solo hits, Barlow found his pop career on the scrapheap, only to find salvation in the form of the great game of bingo. Since then, Barlow’s enthusiasm for the game has become the stuff of legend, and he regularly hosts backstage bingo games on tour with the now-reformed Take That.

Keith Chegwin

After a once-promising acting career, which included a role in Roman Polanski’s Macbeth, fizzled out in the mid-70s, Chegwin found his natural home in children’s television on show such as Saturday Superstore and Cheggers Plays Pop. His cheeky-chappie persona won him lots of fans but his career stuttered towards the end of the 1980s as his alcoholism became more and more of a problem. Having kicked the booze and published the obligatory tell-all autobiography (called Shaken Not Stirred, if you’re interested), he then went on to make what he describes as ‘the worst career move of my life’, fronting a nudist assault-course gameshow called ‘The Naked Jungle’ that was roundly mocked and was even condemned in the House of Commons. With his career in the gutter, Chegwin decided to cash in on what remained of his cult appeal by launching his own bingo website called Cheggers Bingo. Online reviews of this site are mixed to say the least, with most online bingo fans preferring to play for the larger cash prizes on offer at sites such as Jackpotjoy.