From Camelot To Sky audio version  |  13 mins  |  Listen now

‘It was slightly like telling your mum and dad that you’re leaving home, because Lulu [Bridges] and Jeremy [Carey, who founded the agency in 1991] had trained me really. But they were great. I think they realised that it was something I needed to say yes to, so we left on terrific terms,’ he recalls.

Ridsdale didn’t appoint Tavistock, though, at Camelot. ‘If I had joined a Telco, I would have picked the phone up straight away. But we didn’t particularly work in the gaming and gambling space.’ Instead, he arrived at a company that already had more than 25 agencies on its books, including some regional operations which had worked for Camelot since its inception in 1994.

In Liverpool, for example, there was ‘Jane: she makes it happen. I didn’t need an office in Liverpool, but I did need resource in Liverpool and Manchester, somebody who could just show up and had the right relationship with the Liverpool Echo or other regional papers’, he explains.

‘One of the beauties about the National Lottery is that we did very small things, to very big things, and you needed to have a concertina capability, because you can’t have thousands of people in a comms, corporate affairs and marketing function just in case you need them. But we had a nice blend of skills, experience, regions and scale.’

For example, to deliver the National Lottery’s Big Bash, a New Year’s Eve party that was broadcast on ITV1, Ridsdale’s former in-house team, comprising around 120 people including 30 in corporate affairs, scaled up to 1,200 people as it worked with specialist agencies and The Big Idea production company.

About six weeks after joining, Ridsdale attended a reception for a leading retailer where he learned there was growing dissatisfaction with Camelot. ‘I turned up to listen and they gave us both barrels. But they helped us understand what was wrong. They weren’t getting enough visits [from us]. The response time was down. It was just basic disciplines really, but I promised to listen and to work out what was possible. And we did. We effectively did what they told us to do, and lo and behold they liked us again,’ he recalls.

‘The advantage of being completely new is that people will tell you. Three months in, you don’t have that honest conversation. But we were able to show up, honestly say that we are doing a strategic review because the business isn’t where it should be, and that we were going to build a plan to fix it. But we don’t know how yet, so this is where you get to tell us. Nobody was unpleasant, but a lot were direct and frank and it helped.’

He launched an initiative, which he admits ‘ripped off’ Royal Mail and its gold post boxes, and created gold collateral for independent retailers who had sold winning tickets. ‘All the retailers wanted to have gold play stations, because it makes people queue, to think Oh you’re lucky, I’ll have a Lotto ticket. It sits outside the store. It helps drive footfall. Having a gold play station is an honour, and a great marketing tool if you’re an independent retailer.’

Ridsdale also visited many newspaper editors. ‘I didn’t know any of them, but I just rang and said Hello, I work for the National Lottery. I work for Camelot. Will you help me? And they said yes. I was amazed. They were so generous with their time,’ he recalls. ‘And we did listen to them, and I hope they feel proud about the help they gave.’

While the purpose of the National Lottery is to raise money for good causes, Ridsdale’s strategic plan focused on reclaiming its role in national life. It was a turnaround situation. Ticket sales had fallen £600 million year-on-year. When it had launched 17 years before his appointment, the National Lottery had been ‘exciting, but it had lost its place in modern Britain’, he says.

Ridsdale adds: ‘The role of the National Lottery is about people dreaming of winning – on average, there are 365 millionaires a year – but it is also about changing society and giving people a source of pride in that. The goal of the campaign that we ran around the Olympics was to make people who buy lottery tickets proud that they were supporting our athletes, because they do and there’s value in that. If we didn’t tell them, or show them the impact they have every time they buy a ticket then there’s no source of pride. There’s no value for the player.’

The National Lottery last year raised around £35 million a week, which is roughly equivalent to the total funds raised by the Children in Need 2022 appeal. ‘That’s an extraordinary level of funding that we needed to connect people to. The National Lottery hands out so many grants, some of which are very small, so you cannot celebrate each one. What we tried to do was to celebrate the impact that the National Lottery had in culturally relevant places,’ he explains.

It meant that, when Covid struck, Ridsdale was clear that the role of the National Lottery was not to fund the NHS. Instead, it was to show up and support communities, whether that was through Sport England or the Arts Council, or whether it was about bailing out, supporting or funding projects that were helping people through those difficult times.

‘That was a really important role for the National Lottery. It was relevant. It had cut through because people say Okay, I get that. That’s good. I buy a ticket and my money is doing something that I care about right now,’ he explains.

Less than a week after lockdown, the National Lottery Community Fund had accelerated £300 million of funding for distribution over the next six months, offering sums from as little as £300 up to £10,000 to support schemes that mattered to people and their local communities.

And that is how the National Lottery, spearheaded by Ridsdale and his team, ended up saving the most British of institutions – the pantomime. Dubbed Operation Sleeping Beauty by the then culture secretary Oliver Dowden, the scheme involved the National Lottery buying the seats that, because of social distancing, theatres could not sell.

‘There had been a call from government for ideas or help to come up with a way to bail out local theatres or they would go to the wall, as there was no more money,’ he explains. ‘We came up with the idea to help and to Save Panto, which is super-British and anti-culture.’

Every theatre has a different configuration, but, in effect, if a theatre had 100 seats, social distancing meant it could only sell 65 tickets for a performance. However, in normal circumstances it would need to sell 85 seats to break even, so it would be operating at a loss if it were to host any shows. Ridsdale’s team worked out the cost of buying excess tickets that could not be sold by local theatres, and extended an offer to do so.

The first theatre to sign up was the iconic London Palladium, which was staging Pantoland, a variety performance compered by comedian Julian Clary and starring singer Beverley Knight. The first night, however, was hosted by the National Lottery to thank key workers and their families, and was attended by the then Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and their three children. As the children of key workers left the theatre, they received gift bags from toy shop Hamleys – having been asked what they would like on their way in.

But the excess tickets were not wasted. The National Lottery ‘called in’ the tickets it had bought the following year, when customers buying a lottery ticket also had the chance to enter a ballot and win seats at their local Pantomime. A collaboration with the Daily Mail offered readers with lottery tickets the chance to claim four tickets, simply by entering a code from the back page of certain copies of the paper.

A variation of the initiative was launched after the pandemic, whereby National Lottery underwrote a £2 million Love Your Local Theatre scheme, offering two-for-one tickets to encourage customers back into their local theatres at a time when confidence was still weak. One third of participating venues sold 100 per cent of their tickets, and more than 60,000 tickets were sold – generating ticket sales in excess of £1 million for participating theatres and also encouraging new audiences.

And the National Revive Live Tour offered National Lottery ticket holders the chance to get two tickets for the price of one for a series of one-off concerts at grassroots music venues featuring stars such as Sam Fender, Paolo Nutini and Rag N Bone Man.

Teaming up with the Music Venue Trust, the National Lottery offered £1 million for the first National Revive Live Tour, which underwrote the costs of 278 live shows at 138 grassroots venues. ‘These places were going to go bust,’ explains Ridsdale. ‘But we just phoned up and asked people for help, and a number of them said yes.’ For example, Sir Tom Jones, who is used to singing Delilah, Sex God and countless other hits at venues like the Wembley Arena, performed at the 850-seater Cambridge Junction. His one-off concert sold out in four hours.

Such was the success of these schemes that in one memorable day, Ridsdale found himself taking calls from three Secretaries of State looking for similar creative initiatives to support their sectors. He believes that it is through schemes, such as Love Your Local Theatre, and the Heritage Lottery Fund, which awards grants to historic buildings where the cost of repairs is prohibitive, that the National Lottery earns its ‘social contract’ to operate.

‘I was talking to [comedian] Frank Skinner, and he said that in every theatre he visits, he says one of two things. This looks great, have you had it done up recently? And they say, Yes, we got National Lottery Funding. Or This place has let itself go, to which they say We’re waiting to see if we’ve got National Lottery Funding,’ he says. ‘So, to be able to say to people When you’re buying tickets, you’re supporting theatres, venues for gigs or grassroots football, art exhibitions, it matters a great deal. The V&A Museum in Dundee [the first design museum in Scotland] was built with lottery funding. We need to demonstrate that impact.

‘It cuts through when you connect this relationship between play and purpose. Every time you buy a ticket, something extraordinary happens. I think that’s what we changed in the past five years. It’s changed the way people feel about the National Lottery; brand positivity reached record levels. Three times in the three years [2019, 2020, 2021], it reached the same peak as it got to during London 2012 when lottery funding was front and centre. We were the second most improved brand during the pandemic; the first was Netflix.’

Such recognition also translated into record sales. In November 2022, Camelot Group announced that first half sales had topped £4 billion for the first time while it had returned just shy of £1 billion to good causes over the same period – or £47 billion since its launch in 1994.

But it was to no avail. In March 2022, the Gambling Commission named Czech-owned Allwyn as its preferred operator to run the National Lottery when Camelot Group’s current ten-year licence concludes in February 2024. Allwyn has pledged to donate more than £30 billion to good causes within a decade – far outstripping the promises made by Camelot.