Gambling led me to stab the Turner prize winner

How about a discreet desk at the National Theatre where you could bet on the number of standing ovations?

At last Sunday's Turner prize reception at Tate Britain I had a rather awkward moment. When I went to congratulate the winning artist, Keith Tyson, I still held in my hand a small blue ballpoint pen that a certain class of person will immediately recognise as coming free with your local bookmaker's compliments. Shaking hands with Mr Tyson, I forgot to take the aforesaid pen from my hand. I thus, in an absent-minded act of cultural terrorism, stabbed him.

"Oh man, you've made me bleed," he cried. And just as I was wondering whether "Winning hand bloodied by bookie's ballpoint" could be a conceptualist entry for next year's prize – one, indeed, that Kim Howells, the Secretary of State for Culture, might applaud – Mr Tyson looked down at the pen that had maimed him, exclaiming: "And you're a gambler."

Few vices, I am beginning to suspect, come with such telltale signs. It is not just the free supply of pens; though it is revealing to note just who gives you that split second of eye contact when you bring one out. They too have "been there" and collected the country's most expensive freebie. They too have been caught out reaching in their pocket for a handkerchief and bringing out instead a blue slip with yesterday's hard-luck story written on it.

There is a strange disparity between gamblers and addicts of alcohol. The latter are usually betrayed by physical tics. Gamblers are betrayed by tangible objects. Secret drinkers aren't caught out absentmindedly bringing a bottle out of their raincoat pocket. Sex addicts don't carry their latest conquests about their person. But gamblers' pockets are a seedy hotchpotch of betting slips, newspaper tips and pens.

My own gambling is sporadic, encouraged by the ever more surreal football betting, where you can have a wager on first scorer, last scorer, correct score, correct score and first scorer together, first manager to be sacked, number of corners, number of red cards... It's only a matter of time until odds are offered on time of first crowd disturbance and numbers of fans ejected. In a successful treble with the identity of the next football chairman to have his sexual peccadilloes revealed by the News of the World's Mazher Mahmood, the winnings could pay for a decent holiday.

But while such bets on football should be saluted as a mixture of sporting adventure and advanced mathematics, they are regarded, like all telltale signs of gambling, as soft pornography. It's the same story with the racing page of a newspaper. Even a broadsheet's racing page is regarded as the sort of soft pornography that you have to hide on a train journey, reading it only if the books-of-the-year page is facing the other passengers. It is an interesting fact that those who run focus groups for newspapers will tell you that while every reader they interview boasts of reading the leader columns, not one person will admit to reading the racing page.

And that is the other thing that sets gambling apart from other, more fashionable vices. It does not get the sympathy vote from the chattering classes. The withering look one receives when mentioning gambling is never aimed at drinkers. Alcoholics and drug addicts are unfortunate sufferers of an illness, and the beneficiaries of Home Office rehabilitation schemes. Besides, historically, their number has included no end of playwrights, actors, novelists and philosophers. Epicurus, by definition, enjoyed a drop.

Drink has always had its aesthetic credentials. But the cultural cachet of gambling is low. The pubs of Hampstead and Primrose Hill are awash with actors, writers and comedians. The betting shops are not. Madonna and Gwyneth Paltrow gain a certain street cred from propping up the bars near their London homes. But they have yet to be sighted in the local William Hill. I suspect more artists gamble than admit it. Keith Tyson, this year's Turner winner, did, after all, recognise my pen.

If gambling is to improve its social standing and cultural cachet, it has to embrace the arts in the way it has embraced sport. Lord's, the home of cricket, has a betting tent, and many Premiership grounds have betting outlets. Perhaps it is time for a discreet desk next to the bar at the National Theatre, where one could bet on the number of standing ovations the production will receive – or the number of boos, in the case of the English National Opera. Back at the National, think what great combination bets one could have had with Martine McCutcheon and My Fair Lady: 11/4 she makes the matinée but not the evening.

Gambling has no champions in the cultural establishment. It has to forge links through carefully chosen sponsorships. At Glyndebourne, British American Tobacco sponsored Carmen. Why not the Ladbrokes Ring, with side bets on who comes first in "The Ride of the Valkyries"?

d.lister@independent.co.uk