Ten years ago, I was 16. Not much into smoking and with few offers of sex, I was a bit stuck for ways of showing how grown-up I was. Then the National Lottery began. Precisely because it made me feel adult, I bought a ticket and won a tenner. I played it on and off for the next few years, won nothing and gradually lost interest.
However, if the "It could be you" slogan had come true, and I had been the one in 14 million to win the jackpot, I suspect that people would not have been hugely pleased for me. The reason is that 16-year-olds do not feature on our list of "deserving winners", kindly constructed and maintained for us by the tabloid press. This list includes anyone young, anyone already well-off, the unemployed, anyone living in an "unusual" family situation (a gay relationship, for example) and anyone convicted of a criminal offence. "Deserving people" include the disabled, the elderly and the poor, as long as they have worked in a decent job all their lives and have a "normal" family life.
Therefore, everyone was delighted when Doris Tiff's syndicate of 12 dinner ladies won £2,353,332 in September. These were deserving winners because they were in low-paid jobs, and old. Even better, they had worked in a school for children with special needs. By contrast, everyone was horrified by Iorworth Hoare, who won £7m when he bought a ticket while on temporary release from an open prison where he was serving a sentence for attempted rape. Yet the very nature of the Lottery is, well, that it's a lottery. Anyone could win, rapists or not.
Not only do we judge our winners; we also like to judge what they do with their winnings. I'm sure that, if I won a million or more, it would change me. But strangely, we admire most of all those people who declare that it won't change them a bit. And we applaud them when they decide to spend it not on themselves, but on their family and friends. We like this because it comforts us with the idea that if any of our family or friends won the Lottery, there's a chance that they'd spend it on us, too, thus making the odds of us being in some way a winner that bit better.
What surprises me - although it shouldn't, because clearly people who play the National Lottery like to gamble - is the number of people who use their winnings to head off to Las Vegas. One winner did just that with more than £20m in the bank. Presumably they didn't need to win more money - perhaps they just wanted to lose some of it.
There is also admiration for those who give to good causes. In fact, we carry the notion of deserving winners to good causes, too. By their very nature, they are all good, but some good causes, it seems, are better than others. A BBC Online poll has been asking readers "What is your favourite good cause?" in a poll to decide which ones win a National Lottery Helping Hand Award. One respondent suggested that "Lottery tickets should have a tick box for who you want the money to go to".
Presumably he means which good cause, though I suspect that many people would like to be able to specify the winner, too. And our favourite kind of winner, as in many things (think Eddie the Eagle), is the hapless winner. So our absolute favourites are such not because they are hugely "deserving", but because they are ever so slightly inept - the sort who, having gone out to buy a celebratory bottle of wine after a £1.5m win, are unable to drink it because they don't own a corkscrew.
