The BBC's pioneering interactive teletext service Ceefax began thirty years ago today. Engineers had worked out that they could piggyback extra data on top of the usual TV signal, and a very basic viewdata service was established on 23 September 1974. There were only 30 pages to begin with, and probably not many more viewers, but this really was the dawn of the interactive on-screen revolution. You pressed a button, typed in a three-digit code, waited a minute and you had the world at your fingertips. Well, 24 lines of up to 40 characters each, anyway.
It's sometimes hard to remember how little access we all had to information back in 1974. There was no 24 hour television, no internet and no mobile telephony. If you wanted to find out the result of a football match you had to try to catch the classified results on the radio, or else hope that the score was read out on the television news, or else wait until the morning to read it in a newspaper. With the advent of Ceefax you could find out the result minutes after the final whistle, and even watch the score update during the match. Gary Lineker once famously said that the best place to watch Wimbledon play was on Ceefax, and I for one agree.
My first interaction with Ceefax happened ten years after the launch at the home of a college friend whose family, even in 1984, were early adopters. I was so transfixed by the extra information being transmitted alongside the TV programmes that I almost forgot to join everyone else down the pub. My parents waited until 1987 to buy their first teletext-enabled set. It was the day of the Zeebrugge ferry disaster, at which time Ceefax should have come into its own, but we'd been supplied with the wrong remote control unit and so frustratingly could only access the index page all evening. I acquired my first Ceefax-able television in 1991 and, yes, it was worth the licence fee all by itself. Even today, should I ever find myself visiting some friend or relative living in an isolated non-broadband home, Ceefax still remains my best connection with the outside world.
Good old Ceefax - always there, always reliable... unless atmospheric interference has caused some pixellated gibberish to be broadcast instead. 20 million people still use Ceefax every week, despite its many limitations, attracted by a service that is comprehensive, easily accessible and regularly updated. It's still the first place many people turn for news, sport, weather, TV listings, travel information, lottery numbers, film reviews, share prices and even all the latest from the world of chess. Ceefax now contains as many as 600 pages, so you won't be surprised to hear that there's a special anniversary section included today (index: page 190), although you may be frustrated that you can't read it online.
But good old Ceefax now lives under sentence of death from the godawful service that is BBCi. I think we established back in January that, compared to Ceefax, this supposed technological advance is actually slower, less intuitive and generally more crap that its primitive ancestor. BBCi won't be worth using until engineers manage to introduce a method of accessing each individual page that isn't menu-driven... such as the three-digit code system introduced by Ceefax thirty years ago. Alas Ceefax will never reach its 40th birthday because the Government's analogue switch-off will have kicked in two years previously. I, for one, will lament its passing.
How many of the following do you remember? Page 150: the pop-up newsflash Page 160: the pop-up Alarm Clock Pages from Ceefax: sometimes the only thing BBC1 ever used to show in the morning Subtitles on page 199: first introduced in 1975, later moved to page 888 Telesoftware: downloadable BASIC programs for your BBC Micro computer (1983-1989) Using the reveal button: often for quizzes or particularly poor jokes Big chunky graphics: actually they're still there, aren't they?
Does your name appear in any of these lists, and if so does it appear in the top 10 nearest to the year you were born? And are parents trying to give their children posher names these days, or is it all relative?
The Hitch Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy(tonight, 6:30pm, Radio 4): I remember listening to the last series of the Hitch Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy tucked up in bed after a hard day at school in the year before I took my O levels. I still have the souvenir Radio Times with a giant celestial thumb on the front cover (I must check eBay to see if it's worth anything), from which I note that evening I also enjoyed Blake's 7, the Goodies and a LyndaCarter Variety Special. But it was Douglas Adams' outstandingly original flight of fancy that captured my imagination, and I'm sure will again today after a hiatus of almost 25 years. That quarter-century gap has been plugged by a TV series, more books, a commemorative towel, an interactive adventure game, rumours of a film and the tragic death of the author, but it'll be great to have the third series back tonight along with most of the original cast. While we wait, here are some links to remind us all how good it used to be. 42 of them, of course.
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Last Routemaster to Bow: Did you see me on television last night? No, neither did I. I watched BBC London's eight minute Inside Out documentary on the last number 8 Routemaster to Bow with growing incredulity, in the way that you do when the media reports somewhat inaccurately on an event you actually attended. There's a summary of the report here, and you can even watch the whole thing online, though I wouldn't bother. The TV documentary included very little of the very final journey, choosing instead to concentrate on husband and wife team Len and Julie Mizen - he the final driver, she the final conductress. They were both taking retirement on the day that Bow's Routemasters finally bowed out, which provided a touching human angle to the story, although the bare facts beneath were rather shaky.
The last journey was not 'today', it was three months ago. The last journey was not 'from Bow to Victoria', it was from Victoria to Bow. That shot from the footplate supposedly heading eastwards was quite definitely taken travelling in the opposite direction. Routemasters are not being taken off the road because 'a law was passed in 1971 that every bus built had to have wheelchair facilities'. And it probably wasn't wise to say that Len and Julie will miss their 'relationships with the passengers', although it's just as well there were none of these on the final anorak-packed journey. To think that the BBC's so-called journalists were the only people to get to ride the last fifty yards into the garage, and then they went and wasted the opportunity on a 1 second tracking shot. Just goes to show that you should treat everything you see in the media as a work of fiction, until proved otherwise.
Sun Soup: A special hello to the 300 Arseblog readers who turned up here yesterday, which just goes to show that some people will click on anything. It's all because I've provided Arseblogger with a few cryptic clues to the names of famous Arsenal players, and he's running one a day for the rest of the week. It took three hours for yesterday's clue to be guessed so, if you're a Gooner and don't mind wading through a comments box knee-deep in four letter words, you might want to head over there today and see how everyone's coping with the latest puzzle.
The BBC's pioneering interactive teletext service Ceefax began thirty years ago today. Engineers had worked out that they could piggyback extra data on top of the usual TV signal, and a very basic viewdata service was established on 23 September 1974. There were only 30 pages to begin with, and probably not many more viewers, but this really was the dawn of the interactive on-screen revolution. You pressed a button, typed in a three-digit code, waited a minute and you had the world at your fingertips. Well, 24 lines of up to 40 characters each, anyway.
