RIP Ceefax

[CackThosePants]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-19996372

Worth a watch.

Topic

[Pete Tranter’s Sister]

I shall forever mourn ORACLE and Paramount Comedy Text.

[StephenSimpson]

I’ll miss catching up on the football mini news bites on page 302 :(

[Ben Kirkham]

On Sunday mornings in 1997 and 1998, I used to check out the Ceefax page for UKGold Doctor Who listings. Time for it to go, things have moved on. The internet has made everything easily available, but I’ll quite miss sitting in front of the telly, jabbing buttons in the (usually) vain hope that it might move on to the next page and I will always remember the simplistic graphics, exhaustive information and using 888 for subtitles. Happy memories.

[Nick R]

For me one of the most useful things was Now and Next on Ceefax 606/Teletext 120.

In my experience, as long as you lived somewhere with a decent signal that didn’t suffer from too much g[bBeris= ?ext bRe&up, analogue 888 subtitles were generally a lot more reliable than their digital successors have been. On every Freeview/Sky/Virgin box I’ve ever used, digital subtitles suffer from a comparatively long delay between pressing the subtitle button and them starting to appear, and they lag a little too much behind the audio, display certain lines too quickly or in the wrong order, occasionally get frozen on one line of dialogue, or suffer from other irritating problems that generally make them worse than good old Page 888.

jabbing buttons in the (usually) vain hope that it might move on to the next page

The worst culprits for this were the cinema listings pages: within each alphabetical group there were something like 24 cycling pages of listings, and whenever I went to look at it, it would just so happen that I’d just missed the page for my local cinema, by just one or two pages. So I’d go away for a while, come back when I estimated it was showing the right page… and then frantically jab the HOLD button before it changed again.

Ah, the memories!

[Ben Kirkham]

Oh, God, yes I forgot about the HOLD button! Always jammed on the crappy remote I had so I’d blink and miss it!

I’m really not moaning, but I sometimes think it’s a bit of a shame that we can get anything anytime we want nowadays. The searching, the finding, the getting – was always more fun when it required a little more effort. If you’ve not seen it, check out the documentary ‘Cheques, Lies and Videotape’ on the ‘Revenge of the Cybermen’ DVD, that will better illustrate my point. And there’s a little bit about Ceefax!

[si]

I recorded the last ten minutes of the final Pages from Ceefax this morning. It was quite touching.

[p2p_productions]

Surely, it’s only a matter of time before someone writes a custom Smart TV script that, at least, makes digitext *look* like the old-style teletext. If it hasn’t happened already, I really hope it does, eventually.

[Ben Kirkham]

*Awwww!* That’s really sweet, what a good way to go out!

[CackThosePants]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-20032882

[mick]

Life just hasn’t been worth living since Bamboozle went.

[CackThosePants]

Gonna miss the porn pages, which during bad weather was so fucking difficult to get off with.

[Pete Tranter’s Sister]

I recall a lad in school mentioning in slightly jokey, nervous tones about browsing ITV Teletext and finding a gay dating section. According to his Facebook profile, he’s a Billy Bender Bummer Bum Bummite, shoulda been more obvious really…

[Author]

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