When betting shops were first legalised in Britain in 1961, their morally dubious status was not in doubt. These ‘offices’ were not meant to be places of entertainment. Premises were forbidden the use of radios and televisions, and ‘no refreshment of any kind’ was to be served. All in all, as Rab Butler, the Home Secretary at the time, admitted, the government was so ‘intent on making betting shops as sad as possible, in order not to deprave the young, that they ended up more like undertakers’ premises’.

Darragh McGee’s fascinating inquiry into modern sports gambling shows that this approach changed gradually and then suddenly. An incremental relaxation of the Butler-era regime was followed by legislation in the 1990s and at the turn of the century that singularly failed to deal with the fact that gambling was going online, and that its old association with horse racing, a relatively minor sport, had been replaced by the betting firms’ embrace of football. Successive governments did little more than let them get on with it, as the embrace became a chokehold.

McGee, a lecturer in public health at the University of Bath, begins his book with the story of a casualty of the digitisation and relentless marketing of sports gambling. James Grimes spent every waking minute either placing bets on any number of sporting contests or attempting to raise, eventually to