Whatever happened to Ceefax and Teletext, the internet of its time?

In an age before Facebook, when the Walkman was king and smartphone batteries lasted a week, anything seemed possible. In our new series, we'll take a look at the retro tech that shaped a generation. The third in our series looks at Teletext, the service where you could find the news, book holidays and read comic books.

Before there was Sky Sports, before Twitter and illicit streams on the internet, the thrill of following the football on a Saturday afternoon was brought by the endlessly rotating screen of Ceefax.

With its simple blue and white text on a black screen, it had none of the shrill chaos of Jeff Stelling and the gang, nor the immediate right to reply on social media. Just a score, a time and the agonising wait for your team’s page to roll back around. Hopefully with a new scorer appearing under their name.

“I remember the excitement of having a teletext television in my bedroom because I could keep up with football scores in real time while waiting for commentary updates on local radio,” says Teletext artist Dan Farrimond. “There was a similar thrill in waiting for cricket scores to update: 'Oh no, it hasn’t changed for a while now, maybe England have lost a wicket!' And invariably they’d lost two.”

The text-based information service for TVs may seem crude in the light of 24-hour rolling sports and news coverage blaring from every screen, but Teletext’s simplicity fostered a sense of creativity and still elicits a warm glow of nostalgia from those who were there. Sat in front of those scores, reading the world’s news, indulging in a quiz on Bamboozle or catching up on the latest video game news (and rude jokes) with Digitiser.

“Don’t tell my mum, but I also used teletext subtitles to watch late night television with the sound off so as not to wake people in the next room,” says Farrimond. “Closed caption gems such as ‘she farts’ or ‘he belches like a whale’ will forever be etched in my memory.”

The birth of teletext

Teletext was created in the UK in the early Seventies by John Adams, an engineer for Dutch electronics company Philips, when companies such as the BBC explored the concept as television sets became more ubiquitous in the late 60s.

Adams proposed broadcasting the text and geometric shapes in the hidden ‘vertical blank interrupt’ area at the top and bottom of the screen. This information was then accessed by remote control, typing in three-digit numbers to access different pages.

In 1974, the BBC’s Ceefax was the first teletext service to broadcast in the world, with thirty pages of news, sport and weather. ITV followed with its own ORACLE service, before the technology was standardised as the World Teletext Service.

Take-up of teletext was initially slow, due to viewers needing to buy a separate set-top box to decode the information. But by the 80s, most TVs came with an in-built decoder (and renting TVs – remember that? – was widespread, so turnover of new sets was high).

By 1982, two million TV sets were teletext-compatible and the rise of an iconic medium that would span decades began. In essence, Teletext was the forerunner of the internet. It was the first place that headlines would hit, collated into an always-accessible index. John Major would later call Ceefax “an instant window to the world… speedy, accurate and indispensable”.

“The night the first Gulf War started,” says Paul Rose, the BAFTA-nominated screenwriter also known as Teletext’s Mr. Biffo, "I got up to give my infant daughter her night time feed, and switched on the TV with the sound down, so as not to wake my wife, and switched on Oracle. I remember seeing the headline 'THE LIBERATION OF KUWAIT HAS BEGUN' on the front page of the news section. Holding my daughter in my arms, it was all rather chilling.” 

As teletext grew, it wasn’t just the news lines and football scores that built its proto-internet appeal. While teletext found its way to North America and around the world, it was in Europe that its popularity boomed, particularly in the UK. You could book your holiday, read comics (Turner the Worm!), add closed captions onto TV programmes or get a letter printed on Chatterbox or the bizarre Mega-zine on Channel 4. 

Are you a Ceefaxer or a Teletexter?

Battlelines were drawn between the more austere Ceefax and the irreverent content on ITV and Channel 4’s Oracle which later became, simply, Teletext.

“At some point a line was drawn in the sand, and Ceefax’s modus operandi became ‘pure information and facts’,” says Farrimond. “It was quickly established that you could trust Ceefax to deliver news, and Teletext Ltd. to provide lighter, more entertaining content. And you had to pick a side – were you a Ceefaxer or a Teletexter? A videprinter junkie or a Bamboozle addict?”

Nowhere was Teletext’s anarchic spirit better typified than on gaming page Digitiser.

Created by Rose and Tim Moore (Mr. Biffo and Mr. Hairs respectively) in 1993, Digitiser pegged itself as the ‘world’s first daily games magazine’ and quickly found an audience with its risque humour and brutally honest reviews.

“I’d been hired as Teletext’s graphics artist,” says Rose, who also created the page’s Turner the Worm. “I had no journalistic experience whatsoever. They’d asked for ideas from everyone for sections, and I pitched the notion of a video games magazine. They’d been planning a daily page, but my idea was more ambitious – something inspired by all the console magazines that were springing up at the time, this being the 16-bit era of Nintendo and Sega.

“I’d grown up reading magazines such as Your Sinclair and Smash Hits, which had an irreverent, kind of disrespectful, style, and it just felt natural to emulate that. Tim had a very distinct, surreal way with words, and the two of us shared a similar sense of humour. It just evolved that we’d write stuff that made us laugh. Certainly at first, I felt more comfortable writing in a way that I found funny than I was penning serious pieces.”

At its peak, Digitiser was drawing in 1.5m readers every day. Reports have it that Teletext’s senior editorial team didn’t have the stomach for the controversial computer games page but couldn’t shut it down due to its popularity. But a series of wrangles saw Digitiser replaced by the more straight-laced GameCentral in 2003.

And as the rise of the internet continued unabated, Teletext was eventually switched off in December 2009 as its readership dwindled. Ceefax followed in 2012 as Britain’s digital switchover was complete, bringing 38 years of broadcast to an end.

The death of teletext?

But the spirit of Teletext and Ceefax lives on. Teletext Holidays lives on as a popular travel website, while Rose revived Digitiser as a website – Digitiser2000 – in 2014 and continued the magazine’s honest and anarchic content online. Recently, Rose has also started a Digitiser YouTube channel.

“I’m knocking on a bit now, and there’s no dignity in trying to start a YouTube career at my age. I’m just doing what I like,” says Rose. “Digitiser is very much part of my DNA now, and a lot of people seem to remember it fondly, so I’m using the brand awareness to help fund little creative projects that I want to do.

“I get a lot of Digitiser fans telling me that we shaped their sense of humour, or were there for them when growing up was tough,” Rose adds. “I’m always blown away by it. I was just doing it in isolation; I had no idea it meant so much to people. What’s really nice is that – nearly 30 years on - we’re building a new, younger, audience that’s co-existing with the old one." 

Farrimond, meanwhile, works as a digital retro artist, creating works in the identifiable aesthetic of Teletext’s pixel art. He decided to write on teletext for his dissertation, before creating artwork for the International Teletext Art Festival in Finland.

“Making teletext art is therapeutic, like assembling a mosaic, or completing a jigsaw puzzle,” he says. “There is something called the Tetris effect, where people who play the game begin to fit pieces together whenever they close their eyes. I can say it’s very much the same with teletext, as after a long day designing art to a tight deadline, I can see the pixels light up in my dreams. That’s not something I necessarily recommend trying, but it does happen!”

Now Farrimond creates teletext art on commission, including a music video for local band the Lancashire Hotpots, teletext themed Christmas cards, creating faux-teletext services for escape rooms and performing workshops at the Tate. Most recently, Farrimond has found himself embroiled in the UK election… up against the Prime Minister.

“I made election-themed pages for a guy called Count Binface, who’s running against Boris Johnson in his constituency of Uxbridge and Ruislip,” says Farrimond. “Binface’s main policy is to bring back Ceefax, so teletext seemed like the perfect method to disseminate his manifesto.”

Count Binface’s electoral victory seems unlikely, even with Farrimond’s help. But for the pure nostalgists that miss their daily Ceefax fix, ‘Teletext Archaeologists' such as Alistair Buxton and Jason Robertson are recovering old pages from dusty VHS tapes.

There is no official archive of Ceefax or Teletext pages and once a page was overwritten in the broadcast, it was gone. But by using old video tapes of TV programmes, the coders could extract the original Teletext data hidden in the broadcast with a ‘deblurring’ algorithm and recreate the pages as they were on the day.

And with some HTML wizardry, Robertson’s archive on his website allows you to enter page numbers and flick through the stories of the day. By preserving some of those brilliantly concise, three paragraph news stories and sports reports, it offers a window into the skill and appeal that came of Teletext’s limitations. And why its legacy endures  today.

“Teletext was part of our psyche for a substantial period of time,” says Farrimond. “It stuck around so long as to become ubiquitous: in addition to everyone’s living room, it was in electronics shop windows, airport departure lounges, pubs and restaurants, betting shops, hotels and travel agents. In many ways, it was the Internet of its time.”