Something strange is happening in the world of bingo. The game of blue rinses and redcoats, of “legs eleven” and “two fat ladies”, has been co-opted by clubbers, comedians and counter-culturalists. Over the coming weeks alone in London you can find transgressive bingo at the Barbican, the ICA and, best of all, the love of bingo that dare not speak its name: the Underground Rebel Bingo Club.

Supposedly, the URBC legend began in 1657 when Oliver Cromwell outlawed London's only bingo club, driving its members underground. For 350 years they have met clandestinely to fight tyranny with faintly rubbish prizes, and cry freedom along with “house”. Members are sworn to secrecy. But at the risk of stopping an assassin's blade in some back-alley this night, we hold it our solemn duty to shine a light on their arcane ritual.

It's a cold Friday night at the Mission Room in Islington, North London where visitors are informed that bicycle theft will be the subject of tonight's Neighbourhood Watch meeting. The compere, the comedian Trevor Lock, soon takes the stage, and asks if the doors are well and truly locked, before revealing... that this is no Neighbourhood Watch meeting! On comes tonight's guest presenter, Miss Gipsy Wood, in long white gloves and a shimmery red dress slit to the hip. She announces the first of the night's prizes, all chosen from the comically impractical curios at IWantOneOfThose.com. But what is “limbo string”? She proceeds to demonstrate. Not too plausibly, given her unfeasibly long legs and high heels, but certainly distractingly.

Then the number-calling begins. “I like wine, number 9,” Gipsy purrs. “Nine, the number of symphonies Beethoven wrote,” Lock counters lugubriously. “Anything for you, number 32,” Gipsy promises with a 20-megawatt smile. “Thirty-two, the number of inches that used to be in my waist,” Lock deadpans. “Try me I'm free, number 63,” Gipsy breathes, blowing a kiss. “Sixty-three, the number of working cells in Amy Winehouse's liver.”

It's a terrific and, Lock says afterwards, entirely improvised double-act that soon has the audience in hysterics. “Now that's why we live in London,” a woman on my table cries with patriotic fervour, as a young Circus Arts graduate with a cartoon face gratuitously takes to the stage with two dozen hula hoops. My table-mate, like most here, is in her late twenties, and a first-timer: she was looking for some Friday night fun that wouldn't break the bank. And there is a Blitz-spirit, credit-crunch-defying vibe to the URBC, with its £1 bingo cards and its cheap beer, that is much enhanced by Gipsy's succession of gorgeously retro gowns: “My mum was a showgirl,” she'll explain after the show, “and I grew up in a vintage clothes store.”

“Even I fancy her!” shouts the ever more excitable girl on my table after Gipsy's penultimate costume change. And when she returns for the fourth and final game dressed only in heels, elbow-length gloves and the scantiest, spangliest thong bikini, a hundred jaws hit the table as one. Doctors fear some spectators may never recover the full use of their scorched eyeballs. By the time the grand prize is given out - a sleeping bag with legs that you wear like a suit - the winner is so hyped up that he puts it on, launches himself at the floor, and does the worm dance all over the stage. It's that kind of night.

Days later, after a dangerous undercover investigation, we can finally reveal the ringleaders: Freddie Sorensen and James Gordon. “We went into the Mecca bingo hall in Hackney once,” Sorensen explains, “since they were promoting it as younger and trendier, but it was just stressful: they call the numbers so fast, and if you make any noise people stare at you. So we thought we'd make it fun.”

As freelance TV professionals who have worked on The X Factor, Britain's Got Talent and Big Brother, they say that running a club with a narrative and a back-story “just came naturally. Stories make everything tick, whether it's in drama or Big Brother.” They also put together the End of the World Club (a meteor will hit in four hours, so party like it's your last night on Earth) and Warped, in which a time-traveller recreates various eras of dance music. But the URBC is so successful that they keep adding more nights, putting other clubs on hold.

Before Oliver Cromwell's agents swoop on this pair, however, they might like to take other offenders into consideration. The leader of the bingo renegades is, arguably, Jonny Woo. He launched Gay Bingo three years ago, taking the lead from a trend in Dublin. “More performance art than anything else,” Woo says. It became a cult phenomenon at the T club in Shoreditch, East London, before moving to Shoreditch House and then being snapped up by the ICA. As well as a regular Gay Bingo night tomorrow, Woo plans a special Credit Crunch January Sale Bingo night at the ICA, including a drag jumble sale.

Meanwhile, over at the Barbican, Ida Barr will be shouting out her idiosyncratic bingo calls as one part of her two-week show So This is Christmas. An elderly music-hall singer who tries to embrace multicultural Britain with her rap songs - in a genre she dubs “artificial hip-hop”, with a little “slipped disco” thrown in - Barr has been doing bingo nights for more than two years.

“It's taking traditional forms of entertainment and pulling them apart,” Barr's alter-ego (or is the other way round?) Chris Green explains. “People are very seduced by the things they grew up with and only dimly understood. At the Barbican we'll get all 400 people in the audience doing a hokey-cokey conga line. Right through the Barbican foyer!”

More seriously, Green intends the bingo to be a comment on our acquisitive society. “Ida's catchphrase is ‘Life is not fair, nor is bingo'. The audience shout it out. But when I cheat by giving someone a prize just because I like them, people go f***ing mad! All the prizes come from Poundland, but they're still desperate to get them.”

It's all a long way from 16th-century Italy, where bingo's earliest incarnation is said to have originated, or from the maths professor who in the 1930s diligently calculated 6,000 combinations of numbers for its cards. But while trannies may take over from grannies, just as long as freedom's flame still flickers in British breasts - that, and the chance of a cheap night out - the spirit of bingo will live on.

The URBC is on Fri and Sat and Dec 19 and 20 (www.rebelbingo.com). Gay Bingo is at T Bar Shoreditch tomorrow (www.tbarlondon.com) and at the ICA on Jan 10 (www.ica.org.uk). Ida Barr's So This Is Christmas runs from Wed to Dec 23 (www.barbican.org.uk)