The National Lottery: Daily Play

Just had a look at the National Lottery Daily Play website where you can watch the draw:

http://www.national-lottery.co.uk/player/p/games/daily.do

No music, no voice of the balls, no studio, no gameshow. Just what looks like a dodgy cupboard with one shot of the machine. Looks very dodgy!

Anyway, apart from Ceefax and online, do the BBC make any mention of the Daily Play game - numbers/winners etc.

For this type of draw couldn't they just wheel in a machine to the News 24 studios and screen it each night.

Also, I see on Ceefax the BBC are planning another Lottery show (I think it's called Right Around the World) - looks like another game show with a holiday up for grabs.

Isn't it time the BBC tried once more to introduce light entertainment to Saturday night, rather than gameshow after gameshow after gameshow (before Casualty!)

I wish the BBC One saturday and wednesday draws were like this... however hard the BBC tries to make the lottery programme fun and exciting, it fails.

I hope one day the draw is televised on some obscure "press the red button at 8pm" style draw, and the numbers read out by the CA or stuck over the current programme using a strap.

Well they mentioned Daily Play on Wednesday's lottery update, although maybe that was just for novelty purposes.

By the time the announcer had said "In tonight's lotto draw the winning numbers are confirmed as .... early indications show .... in lotto extra .... there are no jackpot winners tonight .... the thunderball numbers ..... tonight's daily play numbers ...... there are no jackpot winners tonight". We'd all fallen asleep and the announcer had doubled his amount of on air talking he'd done all week!


Remember the time that ITV used to also show the numbers on a saturday night, on an ITV News style caption!

Yes, at 9am on BBC ONE.

What they should do is scrap all of the games apart from the main lottery draw. This would raise the jackpot back to 1994-1995 levels instead of having the jackpot potential diluted over a lot of unnecessary fripperies. And PLEASE get rid of all the games like Winning Lines, Jet Set, In It To Win It etc! Just draw the numbers and get on with showing the next programme!

I don't think the key is a bigger jackpot to be honest....

The bigger the jackpot, the less likely it will be to win it.

If it was up to me, I'd make the jackpot prize smaller, and the intermediate prizes (such as 3 and 4 numbers) much bugger, like £100 for 3 numbers. You'd get loads more people play - hell, I might even start playing it!

I'm sure the three number payout in Ireland is anything up to £100 (Euro equiv), and its popularity hasnt diminished anything like the UK's. If memory serves, you can play the Irish Lotto at Ladbrokes.

i thought you could only bet on the result of the irish lottery rather than enter into the actual draw itself from the uk kind of like saying "i bet saturday's numbers will be 01 02 03 04 ..." and ladbrokes giving you odds on that. is it not something to do with the franchise for the *official* national lottery being held by camelot?

i have never played it myself, but that was how someone explained the system to me (of course im more than happy to be corrected).

You may well be right tvm. I only noticed the ad in the window of my local Ladbrokes because of the picture of the guy with great teeth punching the air with joy. Never got as far as the small print.

Believe me, if you gave £100 for 3 balls, you'd have no money to pay for any of the other prizes! You'd be looking at a £150,000,000 pay out on three balls alone. They don't even sell that many tickets a week. I'd scrap the three ball prize (which is where the greatest proportion of the prize money goes - about 1m to 1.5m winners a draw at £10 a prize = £10m-£15m) and beef up the other lesser prizes.

Reagarding lottery shows - I'm afraid I really don't see the problem. Winning Lines and Jet Set were OK shows that had at least a modicum of thought put into them. Dale Winton's National Lottery Stars was like a modern day variety show.

The draw has always been on at 8pm. Why not do something else, or watch a different channel up to that point if it bothers you that much? It's not as if you can't get the numbers by not watching the show at any rate.

ITV Teletext page 123? Ceefax page 555? Newspapers? I hope he likes Millionaire, becase that tends to clash with the Lotto shows.

Before that, they actually squeezed in an 'ITN Lottery Result' programme - the result was presented as a news bulletin!

I think the best lottery show was the original 15 minute one. Spend 3 minutes chatting at the start, 10 minutes showing you where they were spending your money, 2 minutes drawing the numbers, job done.

I don't see the point of tying the lottery to a gameshow when the majority of viewers there at the end have only tuned it to see the draw. I know of very few people who specifically watch the whole lottery gameshow.