Ray Winstone fronts bet365 adverts profiting off punters’ bad fortune
The geezer guaranteed to win: Actor Ray Winstone fronts bet365 adverts profiting off punters’ bad fortune… no wonder his own daughter is horrified
- Actor Ray Winstone appears in a series of television advertisements for bet365
- Winstone asks viewers to ‘get mobiles and laptops out’ to gamble on live sport
- Even the actor’s daughter Jaime said she ‘wouldn’t have done the ads’ herself
Ray Winstone was 22 when he found fame in the cult film Scum, playing a borstal inmate who bellowed ‘I’m the Daddy’ while boshing other youths with an iron bar.
Four decades later, he continues to parrot the same old catchphrase, popping up endlessly on TV to chirp about being ‘the Daddy’.
While the gravelly tough-guy accent has barely changed, the motivation with which he utters that famous line has since — shall we say? — evolved.
For having risen to become one of Hollywood’s most celebrated character actors (arguably the most bankable cockney gangster since Sir Michael Caine), the star of Nil By Mouth and Sexy Beast has an altogether more contentious celebrity status.
Ray Winstone (pictured with his Bichon Frise Bobby) was 22 when he found fame in the cult film Scum, playing a borstal inmate who bellowed ‘I’m the Daddy’
The reason? Winstone’s decision, roughly a decade back, to wave goodbye to a hefty portion of his artistic soul and sign a lucrative, but morally debatable, deal to promote a company called bet365.
Based in the tax haven of Gibraltar, the firm has, with Winstone as its public ‘face’, become the world’s biggest and most rapacious online gambling company.
Its adverts, which typically see Winstone imploring viewers to ‘get your mobiles and laptops out’ to gamble on live sporting events — or, as he chummily puts it, ‘have a bang on that!’ — are among the most widely aired on TV.
The firm’s online promotions, urging punters to wager on events that are ‘in play’, have become frustratingly hard to avoid. But they are clearly paying off.
Last year, bet365 made profits of £682.4 million and paid its chief executive, Denise Coates, £265 million in salary and dividends.
Winstone’s share is unknown, but encouraging fellow members of the working class to ‘have a bit of action’ as he puts it, helped the Hackney-born actor to accumulate significant wealth, and, be a client of Coutts, the Queen’s bank.
Winstone’s personal service company, through which he channels a portion of his professional income, had amassed £3.3 million in its bank accounts by April 2017.
On the home front, he divides his time between a converted farmhouse near the Sicilian town of Cianciana and a five-bedroom pile outside Harlow, Essex, where he keeps his collection of Jaguar sports cars and bespoke three-piece suits.
The property is also home to Elaine, his wife of 40 years and the mother of his three daughters (one of whom is actress Jaime Winstone).
It has a Del Boy-style pub in the back garden called Raymondos, complete with a garish neon sign, where Winstone, 62, and his friends meet to drink beer, dance and occasionally enjoy karaoke.
Bet365’s adverts, which typically see Winstone imploring viewers to ‘get your mobiles and laptops out’ to gamble on live sporting events, are among the most widely aired on TV
There’s also space for a pair of pet pigs, named Ronnie and Reggie after the Kray Twins, the East End gangsters who were friendly with Winstone’s late father, a market trader-turned-cab driver.
According to plans recently approved, Winstone will be adding a big extension at the back of his home, while converting an existing portion of the property into a ‘boot room’.
Correspondence between his architects and Epping Forest Council show he’d also hoped to add a grand, stately home-style stone porch.
Rejecting the proposal, planning officers suggested ‘a simple porch, open, made in timber and covered with a pitched roof would be more in keeping with the understated style of the house’.
How different the world of such lavish spending is to that inhabited by those in the most deprived areas where families are being devastated by gambling addiction.
The most recent official figures show the gross annual yield of the British gambling industry was £14.4 billion.
The Church of England has warned that adverts such as those fronted by Winstone have created a ‘moral crisis’, particularly among young viewers from less affluent backgrounds, who might see him as a role model.
Meanwhile, the Gambling Commission announced before Christmas that there are 55,000 problem gamblers aged 11-16, a number that doubled in a year, while research funded by Tory peer Lord Chadlington found that 60 per cent of teenagers believe the industry’s adverts make gambling ‘look fun’.
Junk food Britain: Obesity crisis fuelled by the high street…
Transgender star of BBC’s hit drama Baptiste reveals the…
Share this article
Shockingly, just under half of the 1,000 youngsters surveyed by research consultant Populus reckoned such adverts made betting look like ‘a good way to make money’.
Neither Winstone nor bet365 is responsible for every gambling advert or, of course, for gambling addiction.
And the company does take steps to tackle problem gambling, for example by offering a questionnaire on its website for users to determine whether or not they have a problem.
Be that as it may, the firm’s position as market leader means it has a big responsibility.
Research by the Mail over Christmas found that 250 gambling adverts — 16 per game — were shown on TV during live football matches. One fixture contained at least 28.
Meanwhile, an undercover investigation by the Mail this week revealed how Winstone’s bet365 paymasters reward clients who rack up huge losses with weekly cash rebates of up to ten per cent, as part of a cynical policy designed to make them carry on playing.
Footage filmed at the firm’s staff training centre in Gibraltar showed that customers who hit a ‘net loss threshold’ can be turned into VIPs and given ‘incentives’ such as the chance to win FA Cup final tickets, with dedicated advisers at the firm treating them like celebrities.
Even Winstone’s daughter Jaime (pictured right with her mother Elaine and sister Lois) said she ‘wouldn’t have done the ads’ herself
Campaigners say such schemes exploit vulnerable gamblers by keeping them in a cycle where they continue to rack up losses.
Elsewhere during the Mail investigation, a bet365 training officer was filmed telling staff that Winstone had been hired because his gritty persona might appeal to target UK customers.
‘He’s like your hard man. He’s your Arnold Schwarzenegger — no . . . he’s more like Jason Statham. He’s a tough guy.’
Asked about the footage, Winstone refused to comment when this newspaper called at his home a few days ago, saying: ‘There’s the door, thank you very much, go away.’
However, others weren’t so reticent. Labour MP Carolyn Harris, chair of the All-Party Parliamentary group on gambling, described Winstone’s decision to continue taking bet365’s money as ‘shocking’ and said she will ‘never watch’ one of his films again.
‘He’s a film star and people look up to him and think if he says something is OK then it must be,’ she added.
‘He presents himself as a man of the people, of the working class, but he’s romanticising something that destroys those exact people’s lives. Where is his moral compass?
‘The man’s adverts are just awful. He’s a geezer, a typical guy down the pub with the boys. He makes it look like gambling is a perfectly acceptable and normal thing to do.
‘But it’s not acceptable and normal to push people into debt, depression and suicide, and that’s what firms like bet365 are doing. They are, in my view, the very worst of the industry.’
Terry White, a recovering addict who lost £250,000, said: ‘Ray Winstone needs to think about the effect his adverts are having, do some research into problem gambling and ask himself whether he really ought to carry on doing this. Does he really think it’s a good career move?’
Winstone doubtless asked himself the same question in 2009, when advertising agency Drummond Central announced his appointment as the ‘face’ of bet365.
At the time, bet365 was expanding rapidly, having benefited from the Blair government’s dramatic liberalisation of online gambling laws. (It subsequently donated almost £400,000 to the Labour Party).
Revealing Winstone’s appointment, agency managing director Julie Drummond said his ‘tough guy’ persona was ‘perfect’ to encourage mostly male viewers to bet on live-screened football matches.
His links to the sport added to his appeal: a prominent West Ham fan, Winstone had recently played a football manager in the film All In The Game, as well as appearing in the FA’s ‘respect’ advert designed to address unacceptable behaviour on the terraces.
‘Ray appeals because he epitomises football fans within the UK and is a passionate fan himself,’ Drummond said. ‘He is a very intelligent and thoughtful man who . . . has an affinity with people who watch football. Plus he’s very funny and amiable. For that reason, we felt that he was the perfect choice.’
It probably helped that, unlike other Hollywood stars, Winstone has never sought to endorse fashionable political causes.
In interviews, he says he’s rejected invitations to appear in party political broadcasts, saying he’s never voted because: ‘I haven’t yet met a politician I can trust.’
Perhaps appropriately, given bet365’s canny offshore corporate structure, one of his few political obsessions is the obligation to pay tax, a topic he has repeatedly moaned about.
‘I go down the road and I have to pay car tax and VAT and stuff I’ve already paid tax on,’ he once declared. ‘I pay council tax and yet I’ve got to put my rubbish in different bins! I’ve got to do a job that I’ve just paid to have done for me! It’s scandalous!’
A few years earlier, he described life in the Blair era as ‘worse than living in King John’s time. You have a fag, they put a tax on it. You like a drink, they put a tax on it. You drive a car, they put tax on it. It’s like suppression.’
His hostility may be rooted in the fact that, during a career lull in the Eighties and Nineties, Winstone was twice bankrupted by his failure to pay tax bills.
At the time he signed up, bet365’s activities were reasonably uncontroversial. But as the industry’s success has grown, so has public concern over its excesses.
On the few occasions Winstone has been asked to defend his role, he seemed prickly but dismissive.
When he was a guest on Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs and the issue was raised by Kirsty Young, he said: ‘It’s only other actors who give you stick about [the adverts] as if it’s something you shouldn’t be doing as an artist.’ He added that people ‘have a choice to bet’.
Fellow celebrities increasingly disagree. Radio 5 presenter Danny Baker recently said while watching a football game on TV: ‘Wouldn’t it be a treat if at half-time Ray Winstone just said: ‘Tell you what, keep your money tonight and buy your mum some flowers.’?’
A well-known actress told an interviewer: ‘I disagree with gambling quite strongly. There’s a recession on and it’s just another way of making people with no money lose even more. [So], personally, I wouldn’t have done the ads.
‘I understand why he did it — it’s work and when you’re a household name you become a sort of product. But gambling advertising has gone up [about] seven per cent since the recession. I’ve got a friend who has become hooked. Gambling damages lives.’
The actress’s name? Jaime Winstone, Ray’s daughter.
How do they manage their difference of opinion? ‘We agree to disagree and get on with the karaoke,’ she said.
If only bankrupt victims of the cruel trade Ray Winstone so eagerly promotes could move on as easily as that.
Source: Read Full Article