Remote access
Fifty years ago, the Ceefax service was the place for breaking news
BBC Photo Sales
- Caroline Frost
Why did we ever think we needed the internet? A screen that we could dial up to get all the latest football scores, weather forecasts, news headlines and even the recipe of the day? It was already there at our fingertips, courtesy of BBC Ceefax, the world’s first teletext service, which arrived 50 years ago this week.
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It was born of a glorious accident. Back in 1974, BBC broadcast engineers tasked with working out how to create subtitles on screen discovered that “spare lines” at the top of the picture could be used to transmit words or numbers. On 23 September, Ceefax, a service to let us “see facts” – well, of course! – was launched, providing an instant news service while viewers waited for the next bulletin.
For most of the population without teletext-enabled sets, it wasn’t until March 1980 that the fun really began, when the BBC began airing a selection of pages before the start of programming each day. From then on, everything from travel updates, including a long list of roadworks, to overseas weather, share prices, music reviews and Delia Smith’s latest dish, turned up on page numbers forever remembered: page 101 for news headlines, 301 for sports stories, 500 for entertainment and, of course, the TV guide on 606 – and 888 for lyrics to sing along to Top of the Pops. All this to the sound of an upbeat bossa nova performed by an overseas artist deliberately cheaper to broadcast than Ronnie Hazlehurst. Purists, including my pal in the Test Card Circle, collected and catalogued these tunes, and attended conventions for some serious horse-trading over CDs. Disappointingly for them, the music got toned down after 1982, when editors realised an Argentine tango might not be quite the most fitting soundtrack for news of the Belgrano’s sinking.
The user experience could be a challenge. The “hold” button was clearly a godsend for reading football scores and the like, until you “unheld”. You might have stayed on page 4, but Ceefax had moved on – a bit of a bind when you arrived at page 10 out of 27, and had to wait for the carousel to come back round to page 5. Thus did many a school holiday pass. Those tasked with creating the content didn’t have it any easier. Everyone from the BBC travel unit to the Met Office had a shift updating the pages, where the rules were legion: sports reports had to be just four paragraphs long, headlines of exactly 33 characters. One former weatherman tells me of the travails of trying to build a map of the British Isles using Ceefax’s distinctive pointillist pixels: “By the time you’d fitted in the temperature as well, you’d lost half the Devon coastline.”
Ceefax provided an invaluable window onto the world
The 1990s saw more than 20 million viewers use the service at least once a week. National Lottery winners learnt their lives had changed by checking the numbers, QPR football manager Bruce Rioch discovered he’d been sacked when Ceefax told him, and Prime Minister John Major tapped into the cricket scores between meetings in Downing Street. For 38 years, the service provided an invaluable window onto the world, especially via the latest newsflash (page 150) – the equivalent of today’s breaking news alerts on smartphones, except back then we had to seek it out, which was rather like phoning up the TV at our convenience. How civilised.
Like all good things, Ceefax gradually came to an end, finally closing its doors in 2012. The good news is that you can still find the BBC text service, via the red button, on some TV sets that are older than 2019, following a viewer protest, including in RT’s Feedback pages – and also find Ceefax on YouTube via one tireless enthusiast’s efforts to replicate it in the present day.
For others, the 50th anniversary is a chance to remember it fondly. My Test Card Circle friend sums it up: “There was something for everyone. Whatever else was going on in your life, you could turn on your telly, lose yourself and feel connected.”
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Sounds like they should bring it back.
Authors
Caroline Frost
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