Ceefax switch-off

[Mister Six]

Bah, I feel like I really missed out here. I used to bloody love Digitiser - never really bothered with anything else consistently - but my parents didn't have a compatible TV so it was always a treat to enjoy when visiting my grandparents' rather than a regular thing. Sadness.

[Blue Jam]

I'm amazed at how many names I can still remember- Mr Biffo, Mr Hairs, Mr Cheese (which one of them got that Channel 4 sitcom pilot, and what was it called?), The Man With The Long Chin, White Line Warrior, Big Fat Flying Bloke, Wendy Wombat and Rodney Regatta, Lucille Le Dark, Slick Chick and Slender Babe, The Top Tenner, The Fresh Prince Of Luton, Wild Bill Hiccup, Stan d'Alone, Obscure Indie Boy (OIB), Obscure Indie Girl (OIG), Dizzy Indie Dandelion and lots of people complaining about the use of the word "Indie" in usernames... this is starting to look like The Clique list.

I also enjoyed the rivalry that Megazine had with the Backchat, the BBC's inevitably more stuffy, educational and worthy equivalent. I even remember some early examples of trolling from the Megazine types sending messages in- one person asking "what is your favourite out of a cod, a haddock and a kipper? Mine's a kipper". I have no idea why that one has stayed with me but there was a spate of messages quite clearly taking the piss and seemingly from Megazine peeps.

I still get friend requests on Facebook from the incredibly mental Rebecca Nahid.  Apparently she was a horny old goat.  She was also my fiance's penpal, much older than him, and when they met up she cracked onto him.  She used to ring my house and cackle down the phone.

...and of course her- Rebecca Nahid, a writer so unpopular she was the only non-musician to make it into the end-of-year poll's top ten list for the Least Fanciable Female category. She never had a good word to say about anyone, the only specific examples I can remember are her calling Geri Halliwell fat, and then when she lost the weight calling her "the cancerous Geri Halliwell". Ronnie, how old was she when she was writing to The Void/Planet Sound? I always assumed she was about 13, the idea of her being an actual proper grownup is something I can't get my head round.

Cohaagen- just when I thought she couldn't be any less likeable you go and tell me she's involved with the ALF... interesting stuff, it's nice to know she like animals if not people, but maybe she should support the use of animals to find a cure for whatever condition she's accusing Geri Halliwell of suffering from now.

Digitiser used to regularly get letters from people saying "I've never owned a console but I still read these pages every day". I was one such reader- I never wrote in but I was strangely unable to stop reading the games pages despite never having any interest in games. The best bits of Digitiser were never about games anyway, they were the odd pages tucked away at the back of the letters and reviews (on page 7/8 or something) with weird little things like the song lyrics, a bad blocky caricature of Prince (or Prints as they called him) and "press REVEAL to activate SIMU-SING!" which would make the mouth flash on and off... and of course The Man Diary and other regular series which had nothing whatsoever to do with games- as well as The Man With The Long Chin there were others, can anyone remember any more?

Stuff like this had nothing to do with games whatsoever, that's why I read it:

[Santa's Boyfriend]

Clearly there was still rationing going on wherever they filmed CBBC in the 80s, but I'm damned if I can remember it.

[Uncle TechTip]

The Man With The Long Chin there were others, can anyone remember any more?

Mr. T and his constant failled attempts to keep the local KIDS out of his BINS.

Biffo had a BBC3 pilot very late at night, and rather surreal it was too. Was it 'Biffovision'? Didn't he also write a few episodes of EastEnders, around the same time as Andrew Collins?

Loads of stuff archived at Super Page 58

[Mister Six]

Biffo had a BBC3 pilot very late at night, and rather surreal it was too. Was it 'Biffovision'?

It was Knife and Wife, wasn't it? I recall it being rubbish, except for one exchange between a couple of old women playing at doing a quiz in the back of Knife's car:

"What is a cloud?"
"Is it a sky-fluff?"
"YES!"

That made me laugh like a drain.

Biffo also made Bubblegun, which was great until he decided to stop updating it (presumably because he got paid work elsewhere). Christ! That was 12 years ago!

[Small Man Big Horse]

It was Knife and Wife, wasn't it? I recall it being rubbish, except for one exchange between a couple of old women playing at doing a quiz in the back of Knife's car:

"What is a cloud?"
"Is it a sky-fluff?"
"YES!"

That made me laugh like a drain.

Biffo also made Bubblegun, which was great until he decided to stop updating it (presumably because he got paid work elsewhere). Christ! That was 12 years ago!

I've not heard of Knife and Wife, but the Biffovision pilot can be watched in full here: http://vimeo.com/9588202

Edit: Ah, a bit of info on K&W here: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0544775/ - I can't seem to find it online though.

[Mister Six]

Crikey, didn't know about Biffovision. Will get on that later.

[KLG-7A]

There's a Biffovision thread that Biffo secretly posted in here: http://www.cookdandbombd.co.uk/forums/index.php?topic=13241.0

Knife and Wife had Terry Jones doing the voice and the animation looked like Dexter's Lab. It wasn't very good.

[Ronnie the Raincoat]

I also enjoyed the rivalry that Megazine had with the Backchat, the BBC's inevitably more stuffy, educational and worthy equivalent. I even remember some early examples of trolling from the Megazine types sending messages in- one person asking "what is your favourite out of a cod, a haddock and a kipper? Mine's a kipper". I have no idea why that one has stayed with me but there was a spate of messages quite clearly taking the piss and seemingly from Megazine peeps.

...and of course her- Rebecca Nahid, a writer so unpopular she was the only non-musician to make it into the end-of-year poll's top ten list for the Least Fanciable Female category. She never had a good word to say about anyone, the only specific examples I can remember are her calling Geri Halliwell fat, and then when she lost the weight calling her "the cancerous Geri Halliwell". Ronnie, how old was she when she was writing to The Void/Planet Sound? I always assumed she was about 13, the idea of her being an actual proper grownup is something I can't get my head round.

In her twenties, unbelievably.  We had a brief friendship which ended when she told me on the phone that I was, "bringing her down" because one of my best friends (a Belfast Megaziner, actually, who went by Enola the Nosebleed) committed suicide and I was upset.  She was quite a nasty piece of work.

[KLG-7A]

It ended in Scotland bloody ages ago, along with analogue TV. Now that it's switched off in London the whole UK has to read "Ceefax ended today" stories everywhere.

It's all undermined a bit by Pages From Ceefax being broadcast right now, too.

[Ronnie the Raincoat]

But to elevator style music to help you go to sleep in your lonely bed?  I think not!

[Blumf]

'Elevator music'? 'Elevator music'!

The 'selected pages from teletext' broadcasts are always accompanied by the greatest tunes in all of human history!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBb5xLsCdoY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzausNwXbTg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNubU0zUyag

[holyzombiejesus]

Only slightly off topic (and it mentions Ceefax), Bob Stanley wrote this ace article about the testcard (and it's music) for The Guardian recently.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/shortcuts/2012/apr/22/the-test-card-girl-and-clown

I don't suppose anyone is going to the talk/ interview at the ICA tonight?

[Gurke and Hare]

In the early to mid-80s there was a telly you could buy that had a built in printer you could print teletext pages on. I nagged and nagged my dad to get one so I could print the charts out and take them to school, but he wisely never did.

[Gavin M]

That not only sounds brilliant but has put me in a happy place remembering Peter's word processor and printer from Fist of Fun.

[23 Daves]

Only slightly off topic (and it mentions Ceefax), Bob Stanley wrote this ace article about the testcard (and it's music) for The Guardian recently.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/shortcuts/2012/apr/22/the-test-card-girl-and-clown

I don't suppose anyone is going to the talk/ interview at the ICA tonight?

Bob Stanley is full of piss and wind.  The Channel Four testcard was where it was at - ambient electronic weirdness and old-school disco funk all the way.  I even wrote a blog entry about it once (I never plug my blog on here, but I'm only going to be treading over well-worn ground if I talk about this in more depth on-forum):

http://left-and-to-the-back.blogspot.co.uk/2008/05/in-meantime-heres-some-light-music.html

[Blumf]

In the early to mid-80s there was a telly you could buy that had a built in printer you could print teletext pages on.

http://www.marcelstvmuseum.com/photoalbum49.html

Aw, I want one even though there's no more teletext

[Norton Canes]

OK, here's a question for anyone else who like me, spent too long in front of the BBC's primitive textual information dispersal system. Back in the early 80's, Ceefax would go Christmas mad - not just on the 25th, but through the whole of December, with advent calendars, poorly rendered pictures of crackers, blocky snow on the logo, the works. And each day, the kids section would feature a new chapter in the stories of two characters' adventures - a Victorian detective in the mould of Sherlock Holmes, and a warrior in a Tolkeinesque land of fantasy. The respective tales would become epic sagas over the course of the Yuletide season, with upwards of twenty sub-pages per chapter (OK, I know that probably only amounts to a couple of hundred words, but it seemed like a lot when you were waiting for the pages to cycle round). I would wait anxiously for the latest instalments, eager to discover which dastardly criminal perpetrated the murder, and whether the Ring of Elvenpower would ever be returned from the desolate wilderness.

So the question is - what were the names of these characters?

Mottley Purvis

[Norton Canes]

I knew I'd find it eventually

[the]

Mottley Purvis

I knew I'd find it eventually

Well done.

That's one of the few archived teletext snapshots on that site that doesn't open in the teletext viewer.

Full list here:  http://www.uniquecodeanddata.co.uk/teletext76/

[Ambient Sheep]

Nearly crying with nostalgia here.

I remember going on a primary school trip to the British Genius exhibition and seeing Ceefax being demonstrated... it was so The Future.


EDIT: I'm astonished that I never posted on this thread back in 2012.  I certainly read it at the time and am amazed I didn't at least bother to explain what a clock-cracker was.  I'm sure I've done that before somewhere on here, maybe there was another thread...


EDIT 2: Yup, found it.  An earlier thread from when switchoff first started in 2009, it's here.  You can find me being unable to remember that it was actually the British Genius exhibition here, and explaining the clock-cracker at tedious length here (although at least two people seemed to appreciate it, neither of whom are here any more).  And no, I don't...

also know how the 888 subtitles are synchronised with the on-screen events

...although I did once read something alarming about them being sync'd up by a modified cassette recorder or something.


It also seems there was also a slightly earlier thread about Teletext's demise here, which thankfully has no me in it.

[a duncandisorderly]

what was a clock-cracker? spare me no details- I'm technical.

I visited teletext HQ about fifteen years ago, to look at their ring-main system. we'd outgrown our analogue distribution system in the viacom office, with so many new regional & genre versions of Mtv, VH-1 & paramount being launched, & needed a new system. one of the pitchees offered teletext as a case-study & arranged for us to go along. I was bullied into it by the comms guy & the office-services lady, who both saw the ring-main as part of my remit, even though it wasn't broadcast.

anyway, so we had a look around & I found myself at the end of a row of spods bashing out page designs. I asked one of them where they kept the lego bricks. blank look.
"you know, for spit-balling new designs, giving demos to clients..."
nada.
I imagine it was a bit like the receptionist at the dentist who gets fed up with people asking for appointments at 2.30.

I used to do bits & bobs for the viacom text services, but latterly it was all out-sourced, so I don't know which wags ran the paramount/comedy central pages. there were a few professional comedians working on that floor though.

[Ambient Sheep]

what was a clock-cracker? spare me no details- I'm technical.

Indeed you are.  Maybe we should have a beer sometime.

Anyway, see the link in my EDIT 2 above.  It was a technical explanation for non-technical people so maybe a bit long-winded but you should have no trouble understanding it.

I'm just paranoid that I've got some of the details (specifically the encoding) wrong, but since ten-years-ago-me bothered to look up the exact bit timings, I'm guessing the rest of it's probably right too.

[Sebastian Cobb]

When I lived in Aberdeen there was an old shop that still had a faded Oracle (teletext) logo on the outside.

It wasn't kitsch. I can't even remember if the place was open.

[Twed]

what was a clock-cracker? spare me no details- I'm technical.

It's yet basic line-encoded carrier skew offset with comb filter heterodyning. Very similar to the TTP lines on a DRT9, or the London Balk Indexer. Buzby will probably be able to fill you in.

[Ferris]

I had my first record reviewed on the BBC ceefax page (8/10, though they got one of the track names wrong), along with a couple of singles.

I thought it had been switched off long ago!

Edit: oh, it was

[a duncandisorderly]

Indeed you are.  Maybe we should have a beer sometime.

Anyway, see the link in my EDIT 2 above [explaining the clock-cracker at tedious length here].  It was a technical explanation for non-technical people so maybe a bit long-winded but you should have no trouble understanding it.

https://www.cookdandbombd.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,22469.msg1195461.html#msg1195461

I'm just paranoid that I've got some of the details (specifically the encoding) wrong, but since ten-years-ago-me bothered to look up the exact bit timings, I'm guessing the rest of it's probably right too.

It's yet basic line-encoded carrier skew offset with comb filter heterodyning. Very similar to the TTP lines on a DRT9, or the London Balk Indexer. Buzby will probably be able to fill you in.

cheers, both. when we had outsourced teletext data to insert into VBI using a databridge on the outgoing analogue lines, I used to worry that the data would gradually out-run the buffers in the databridge, but it didn't seem to have any deleterious effects. after the migration to DVB, it was up to the encoders & the multiplex to make sure all the data was time-stamped.

but so you may've come across softel's "oliver" equipment then, which bastardised teletext to deliver "pages" of opt-out control to cable operators & sundry rebroadcasters wishing to insert their own adverts or programming. this was placed on line 21, usually only on one field (normal teletext varied quite a bit, but we'd generally fight the case for at least two lines on each field for the sake of robustness in the analogue domain.... less important in DVB, but sometimes a statmux system will dump bits of payload opportunistically & if the text is important- there's a quota to be met for HOH subs, for instance- you might double up on the lines again). the softel kit was made of normal teletext tech, so to stop normal TVs decoding it & displaying break data to viewers, the eight or nine clock cycles at the start of the line were inverted to stop the domestic decoder from trying to read them. in the case of cable ops trying to decode this data, the precise timing & the number of clock cycles was more critical than for normal teletext.
ah but all this is a good while ago....

[JesusAndYourBush]

so I don't know which wags ran the paramount/comedy ... pages.

In the late 90's it was being run by one guy, a guy called Ant(If I remember correctly) who was only being paid to create a programme guide but took it on himself to create all the other pages, including the Mailbox page.  He set up an answerphone for people to leave their comments and spent hours every night transcribing the comments.  The guy was either insane or very dedicated.

[JesusAndYourBush]

Does anyone remember a thing in the 90's on one of the teletext pages (I think on ITV) where you phoned a number and it gave you the number of a temporary teletext page (a high number that wasn't being used for anything).  So you went to that page and then (and here my memory is sketchy, I can't remember if it was a simple game or whatever) basically it used voice recognition, so you spoke into the phone and controlled whatever it was that was happening on screen...  only it didn't work.  Presumably voice recognition over the phone was in it's infancy in the 90's, or the software they were using just wasn't any good, but it literally couldn't recognise anything you said.  A total waste of time.

Around the same time another channel (maybe a satellite channel) had a similar telephone-based thing.  A kind of messageboard/chatroom type thing.  Like the other one, you called a number and it gave you your own temporary teletext page.  You left your message by pressing numbers on the telephone dial.  It used a cumbersome method and messages took ages to type.  I remember one guy called "Mikey" was able to leave long messages really quickly and eventually he revealed he was using a Commodore 64 to generate the relevant tones necessary to leave the messages.   It was easy to guess the number of someone else's temporary page by guessing page numbers within the relevant range and on several occasions I witnessed this Mikey guy leaving messages.  I saw him stirring up arguments by leaving messages and signing off with other peoples names.  An early form of trolling.

[Sebastian Cobb]

Does anyone remember a thing in the 90's on one of the teletext pages (I think on ITV) where you phoned a number and it gave you the number of a temporary teletext page (a high number that wasn't being used for anything).  So you went to that page and then (and here my memory is sketchy, I can't remember if it was a simple game or whatever) basically it used voice recognition, so you spoke into the phone and controlled whatever it was that was happening on screen...  only it didn't work.  Presumably voice recognition over the phone was in it's infancy in the 90's, or the software they were using just wasn't any good, but it literally couldn't recognise anything you said.  A total waste of time.

Around the same time another channel (maybe a satellite channel) had a similar telephone-based thing.  A kind of messageboard/chatroom type thing.  Like the other one, you called a number and it gave you your own temporary teletext page.  You left your message by pressing numbers on the telephone dial.  It used a cumbersome method and messages took ages to type.  I remember one guy called "Mikey" was able to leave long messages really quickly and eventually he revealed he was using a Commodore 64 to generate the relevant tones necessary to leave the messages.   It was easy to guess the number of someone else's temporary page by guessing page numbers within the relevant range and on several occasions I witnessed this Mikey guy leaving messages.  I saw him stirring up arguments by leaving messages and signing off with other peoples names.  An early form of trolling.

No, but I remember them doing something like that with a computer game on Live and Kicking and I commented on the voice recognition and my dad pointed out that it was more than likely just a human controlling a joypad.