Ceefax switch-off

[Blue Jam]

Awwwwww.

Not that I've actually seen any Ceefax or Teletext for at least ten years, but I fondly remember Bamboozle, Megazine, Digitizer, The Real Turner The Worm Being Sick etc. Anyone else find themselves giving even a fraction of a toss?

[shiftwork2]

We said goodbye in the north west in 2009.  East Anglia switched off in 2011.  A few regions will carry on after London later into the year.  A 4 year process.   Seems ridiculous to be 'celebrating' now, before the end, because it's London?

[Blue Jam]

I suppose it's getting the coverage now because it's London. I had no idea it was even still available to view anywhere. Anyone still able to view it? What the hell is it like now?

[HappyTree]

The "reveal" button is the coolest thing ever invented.

[KLG-7A]

Can the Guardian talk about anything without being Twitter bores?

[Cohaagen]

Ceefax, Teletext and 4Text were an important part of my teenage life. I had loads of letters published on page 145 under different noms de plume, and once even managed to get an argument going with myself using letters for one name and faxes for the other. Now and then I think about some of the fucking nutters who used to persistently write in to the text pages. Some of them even managed a "turkey", with triple submissions on Ceefax, Teletext's "Write On", and the music page on Channel 4 all on the same day. Whatever happened to champs like Rebecca Nahid, Whitelinewarrior, and the inimitable Stuart N Hardy?

When I was about 15 I sent a mocking letter to Teletext alleging that their grumpy TV critic Sam Brady was actually a pseudonym used by various hacks and got a snotty message written on a Teletext postcard in reply a few months later signed "Sam Brady". He is a real guy, but his name is actually Steve Regan, so I was half right. He is a fucking tosser.



I kept the card for years but my arse of a father threw it out a while ago.

Here's a sweet poem by Rebecca Nahid at the Animal Liberation Front website:

http://www.animalliberationfront.com/Saints/Authors/Poetry/Number43-poem.htm

[Gulftastic]

Teletext, or the 'skinternet*', was a big favourite of mine. It made for great reading as I ate my breakfast. Channel 4 for the music, movie and gaming pages, ITV for the sport and TV, BBC had good film stuff and decent letters pages. Favourite of all was the Letterbox on Paramount Comedy Channel.
Sky Digital have a small service, but it can't compare to the good old days.

[dr beat]

Great stuff Cohaagen, Sam Brady quite a blast from the past.

I'll no doubt write more shortly as I too spent a great deal of time on the skinternet as a youth, but for now does anyone else recall the 'personal messages' section of (what I think was) ITV's Teletext? Pretty much a prototype Twitter, 15 years ahead of its time.

[biggytitbo]

Wat I don't understand is why something invented by some men in a cupboard at BBC television centre in the 1970s is still faster to use than this new fangled digital text, which is shite.

[Replies From View]

Wat I don't understand is why something invented by some men in a cupboard at BBC television centre

is still faster to use than this new fangled digital text, which is shite.

FAST-TEXT, mate.

[Lyndon]

Damn, that picture of a test match score card on ceefax in the Guardian article really brings back memories of looking at test match score cards on ceefax.

I met my first husband on Megazine, but that's a story for another time.

[Steve Lampkins]

Paging Ronnie...

[BlodwynPig]

I always found it laboriously slow - watching those numbers tick round and then waiting for the 4th page to load up the Tranmere Rovers result

[Replies From View]

I always found it laboriously slow - watching those numbers tick round and then waiting for the 4th page to load up the Tranmere Rovers result

And sometimes it would skip over the one you wanted and start all over again.  Had that with Bamboozle all the time, and what were the multiple choice games called that pre-dated Bamboozle?

Anyone remember Turner the Worm?

[madhair60]

Hey, does anyone remember a comic of some kind about a "worm that turned"?

Turner the Worm, used to apply a drawing of what was inarguably a spunking cock right there on Teletext.

[Replies From View]

Turner the Worm, used to apply a drawing of what was inarguably a spunking cock right there on Teletext.

Changed my post before you replied; sorry 'bout that.

Thanks for the info about the spunking cock.  Had to find a picture.




I love that you needed to press reveal to bring up the solution, thus requiring you to ponder the image prior to doing so.




Hilariously this appears to be for Teletext in general, not just the Turner the Worm page - thus making the "revealed" answer an even less obvious and more arbitrary one.  Brilliant!

[Uncle TechTip]

Hilariously this appears to be for Teletext in general, not just the Turner the Worm page - thus making the "revealed" answer an even less obvious and more arbitrary one.  Brilliant!

No, it was just for the end of Digitiser wasn't it? Teletext marched on heroically for about another six months.

Memorable gag but always tempered by the fact that it doesn't much look like a cock. The writers had free rein to post what they wanted so when I heard about this and rushed to check, the image of what I would find did not match up to my imagination.

[Famous Mortimer]

There was a music reviewer who had a letters page, and it was the thrill of my young life when a letter defending, of all people, Paul McCartney, got published on Teletext (or Ceefax, I forget).

[Blumf]

What will TV channels show late at night when they can't be arsed to put in a video tape? Selected pages from digital text? Naff off!

[momatt]

Here's a sweet poem by Rebecca Nahid at the Animal Liberation Front website:
http://www.animalliberationfront.com/Saints/Authors/Poetry/Number43-poem.htm

Good grief; was she one of those nutters who used to have letters published on Ceefax all the time? I think I remember her name.

I used to check the music pages every day over breakfast.  My Dad thought I was mental.

I have wasted my life.

[Uncle TechTip]

There was a music reviewer who had a letters page, and it was the thrill of my young life when a letter defending, of all people, Paul McCartney, got published on Teletext (or Ceefax, I forget).

Was it Jon Homer? Blue Suede Views on ORACLE.

[23 Daves]

Was it Jon Homer? Blue Suede Views on ORACLE.

...which of course later became Beatbox, which is an altogether less memorable name.

Jon Homer was one of my favourite music journalists at that time, although whether this was because I was young and impressionable or because he just seemed to be operating without bias away from the IPC hoardes I don't know.  I certainly can't check, because so far as I know no examples of his writing exist online.  If memory serves he did have a stab at freelance music journalism once Oracle disappeared, but I haven't seen his name in the press for at least a decade now (if not longer).

I was always more of an Oracle man than anything else.  Ceefax always seemed a little bit too orderly and prim (and overwhelmingly blue, though I think BBC2's service was red at one point), whereas Oracle had all sorts of varied and manic content.  Oracle's replacement Teletext started out promisingly enough but eventually pared down its service to Ceefax-styled basics.

I can remember the time my parents first got a teletext equipped set, though, sometime in 1982.  I was fascinated by everything on it - the graphics, the adverts (Crosse and Blackwell used to feature a lot, for some reason), the reveal button.  Home computers had only just started to become less of a weird idea at this point, but we certainly didn't own one, so Teletext was the first look I really got at any kind of computer-driven interactivity.  Believe it or not, at this point in history it looked like an incredibly futuristic feature for any television set to have, especially if you didn't know about it already and it was bundled with a new TV almost completely without fanfare. 

Another thing that I can remember is that 4-Tel used to have a man in their employment who could, if asked, produce teletext graphic animations.  I originally thought it was him that did the video for Junior Senior's "Move Your Feet" which was incredibly similar to his work, but apparently not. 

Oh yeah, and it wasn't until the Digital Switchover that I even understood what a "Clock Cracker" was for. 

[PaulTMA]

If you miss the quality writing and impeccable taste of the 2000s-era C4 Teletext music reviews, then it effectively has a new name:  drownedinsound.com.

[Beagle 2]

What is a clock cracker!? That was a source of real mystery when I was a kid. 4tel was the bestest for just flicking through unlisted pages and finding strange random patterns. I didn't have many friends.

What always shocks me is how long ago it started. It seems completely incongruous to me that you could have been reading about the new Sex Pistols single or the three day week on ceefax.

[holyzombiejesus]

Aw, there used to be a page that had a list of what songs John Peel had played on the previous week's shows.

Also there was a page on the Channel 4 one that just had a list of things that made people angry, such as 'fat girls in mini skirts' or 'people writing the number 7 with a line through it'. I wish there was somewhere nowadays where I could read the whinges and complaints of loads of irritable, frustrated men.

[Uncle TechTip]

Another thing that I can remember is that 4-Tel used to have a man in their employment who could, if asked, produce teletext graphic animations.  I originally thought it was him that did the video for Junior Senior's "Move Your Feet" which was incredibly similar to his work, but apparently not. 

This was Teletext Plus, an improvement that never took off in the real world (needed new teletext decoders in sets). However 4-Tel were mad for it, and you'd often see the animations during 4-Tel on View on Channel 4 early mornings. The only way for the average viewer to see them was when they were broadcast like this. It would always be that annoying proto-Turner character - "Adventures of 4-Tel the Dog"

The ITV/C4 teletext setup was bizarre as is the wont in independent television - ORACLE were contracted to provide a national service on both channels but the TV companies also had to maintain their own service for some reason. So on these channels you effectively had four separate teletext services running.

[Utter Shit]

Watching the football scores on Teletext was one of the most stressful things you could do as a young child.

[holyzombiejesus]

God, I've just remembered that I've actually taken photographs of significant scores on teletext.

EDIT: And significant transfer news. Fucking hell. That was around the same time that I racked up a hundred pounds worth of calls to Clubcall.

[KLG-7A]

Teletext was a big part of my pre-teen and teenage life too. It was the first sort of digital network I encountered, and was therefore some magic. I probably first used it aged 5 or 6 (I was a good reader) and it became a daily fascination. Digi, Turner and Bamboozle are the obvious draws, but there was a lot of good stuff even before that. Pictures. Just the weather map was a sort of joy. Barney's Bunch. Club 555. Information. Colours. A new heading graphic. Subtitles. Engineering pages. Oracle. "In depth" on BBC2 and "At speed" on BBC1. Pages with palm trees drawn on them, trying to sell tickets to countries that may as well have been Mars to me. Corruption from a bad signal. It was all brilliant to me.

I got in loads of trouble around 1997 when I started using the "Chatback" service. Who remembers that? You could call a premium rate number and type in messages that appeared live on screen, to be published on an archive page the next day (birthday reminders and the like). Because I didn't have the Internet but had a hunger for digital networking, I used it as a chat room and rang up a £400 phone bill. I used to spoof other uses as they wrote their messages by copying what they were writing. It was great. I was very upset when nobody understood and thought I had been ringing sex lines.

[Blumf]

A DIY kit for a Teletext receiver, with ultrasonic remote, from 1979:
http://teletext.mb21.co.uk/timeline/eti-decoder/

Cost 178 quid back then which is about 800 in today's money. Makes an iPad look cheap.