It is 10 years since Ceefax ceased to be, at 23:32:19 BST on 23 October 2012, when the last analogue TV signal was switched off in Northern Ireland. It seems longer ago than that – probably because most of us had stopped using it years earlier. With its pixelated graphics and agonisingly slow rolling screens, it had long since been usurped by new media.
But if Ceefax was a relic by the end, it’s easy to forget that its birth was an information revolution, and a breathtaking technological accomplishment. It was a precursor to the world wide web, only without the porn and arguments. In his eulogy to the service, Guardian columnist Barney Ronay pithily referred to it as “the horse-drawn internet”.
The BBC had long been tinkering with offering a written-word news service. In the 1960s, the corporation experimented with the idea of broadcasting a newspaper to hard-copy printers in homes during the early hours of the morning. However, the printer was deemed too noisy, and the project, called Beebfax, was cancelled in 1970.
The inspiration for Ceefax came about, as with so many great ideas, by accident. The technology was developed by BBC engineers, led by Geoff Larkby and Barry Pyatt, who were trying to find ways of providing subtitles on TV programmes for deaf people, rather than produce a news service. They found that a normal television picture of 625 lines had “spare” lines at the top of the picture that could be used to transmit words or numbers using a binary pattern.
Ceefax (a play on “see facts”), the world’s first teletext service, went live on 23 September 1974, with 30 pages of information. During the testing phase, the editor, Colin McIntyre, was the only man in the world to have a Ceefax-enabled TV set at home. McIntyre was a one-man band, writing every page himself, then feeding a yard-long punched tape into machines two floors down in the Central Apparatus Room where the Ceefax signal was encoded.
Because McIntyre worked alone, in the early days the service was never updated at weekends or out-of-office hours. Not that it mattered much – when Ceefax launched, only 6,000 homes had a TV set that could receive it.
That quickly changed. By the time McIntyre retired in 1982, millions of homes used the service, and McIntyre managed a team of more than 20 journalists. By the mid-90s, that figure would swell to more than 60, catering to a weekly audience of 22 million people, making it the most-read news source in the country. On any given day there might be 2,000 pages – travel news, ski and surf reports, kids’ games, recipes, as well as the biggest stories as they broke around the world.
For the first time, the public didn’t have to wait for the next day’s papers, or even the next bulletin, to get the latest news. It was all there, at the touch of a button (well, three buttons – page 101 for headlines).
Journalist and author William Gallagher, now deputy head of the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain, worked on the entertainment pages at Ceefax from 1995 to 2002, and recalls just how influential the service was. “Every newspaper, every TV station had Ceefax’s main news pages on a set somewhere, because that’s where they got news first.
“It was the internet before we had the internet. You could get immediate news in your living room. There was no messing around. This is what’s going on. No angle, no editorialising, straight facts. For something that’s so oddly static – and it looks dreadful today – it was very alive, and it kept changing and updating. It was a very vibrant place to work.”
It also required highly skilled writers. The key, unsurprisingly, was brevity. “It was 70-odd words a page, but there was also a specific number of characters a headline had to be, and it couldn’t be one less or more, so you learned headline writing to a really precise length,” says Gallagher, who personally wrote 16,000 pages in his time at Ceefax. “There were no one-sentence paragraphs, no four-sentence paragraphs. And the way Ceefax worked, you might have a six-page feature, but someone could come in on page four. So every page had to be complete by itself and readable without anything before or after. When Twitter came along, we all found it incredibly easy.”
Among Ceefax’s most popular content were the sports pages. For a generation, the number 301 opened up a world of discovery – tracking your club’s latest signings, or finding out how your cricket team were doing. And on Saturday afternoons, millions of fans would spend almost two hours of exquisite agony watching the pages scroll through the scores and scorers in real time.
If the results service didn’t always bring good news for fans, it wasn’t as bad as QPR manager Bruce Rioch’s experience of Ceefax in 1997. “I was at home watching the Louise Woodward case on television when I turned on Ceefax and read that I had been sacked,” he said at the time. “I am bitterly disappointed they didn’t have the courtesy to … phone me … before I read it on television.”
The sports pages weren’t just about firing; they were also, on one memorable occasion, about hiring, too. In March 2001, third-tier Wycombe Wanderers were set to take on Leicester City in the quarter-finals of the FA Cup, but an injury crisis left them short up front. They put out a plea on their website asking for any interested strikers to contact them, and Ceefax picked it up.
The agent of Roy Essandoh, a non-league forward, saw the story, and the player ended up among the Wycombe substitutes. With 20 minutes to go and the score at 1-1, Essandoh came on to – wouldn’t you know it – head a dramatic winner.
Not all of the sports pages garnered huge audiences. In the 1980s, technical boffins constructed a page that would show real-time progress of the Oxford and Cambridge boats in the annual race, with two dots representing the boats’ positions on the course. But the rudimentary service was, by definition, only available for people looking at their tellies, and as the boat race was simultaneously being shown live on TV, it was a peculiar use of resources.
And there were occasional mistakes. The most notorious occurred in 1994, when Ceefax accidentally launched a news flash announcing the death of the Queen Mother. Being first with the story was one thing, but being eight years ahead of an actual news event was quite another. The BBC quickly issued an apology to the royal family.
If today’s children would view Ceefax as something from the Palaeolithic era, trying to explain to them that it was also broadcast as live TV content for more than 30 years would probably blow their minds. Pages from Ceefax were regularly shown on BBC One and Two during the day, and after closedown. The muzak that accompanied it was the torturous soundtrack to the lives of insomniacs and shift-workers and was – inexplicably – even available to buy in album form.
But just as the internet rendered Ceefax and the other teletext services obsolete, so it has also resurrected and immortalised it – thanks to a young enthusiast from Northern Ireland. Nathan Dane was only 11 when Ceefax was switched off, but in 2015, aged just 14, he started “messing around with teletext stuff” and, with the help of a former teletext engineer, Peter Kwan, launched a version of Ceefax not long afterwards. His current site, an identical simulation of Ceefax, went live in 2019. It’s a gloriously nostalgic recreation. You even have to punch in the page number on a virtual remote control and wait for the digits to tick over until you reach the desired story.
The site, Dane says, essentially runs itself now. “It takes very little work to maintain these days. Put simply, the code reads websites like the BBC News, Met Office etc to get the text, and fixes it up to work on teletext – accented characters have to be removed, for example – then it exports the finished teletext pages. It’s had enough time to become mature, so to speak; it’s seen most of the weird edge-cases that break code like this, and I’ve designed it to work around all but the most major problems.”
The obvious question is: why bother? “Peter Kwan once said it’s like restoring old steam engines or classic cars,” says Dane. “I like that analogy. It takes a fair bit of effort, time and money, and some might say it’s completely pointless. But it gives us something to do, and the end result is something people can look at and go, ‘Yeah, that’s cool.’ The alternative is to let something that was once a big part of people’s lives gradually disappear … The simplicity, the ease of use, the lack of pop-ups asking you to agree to their stealing your info. There’s definitely still a time and a place for that minimalism in today’s world.”
It’s easy to look back at Ceefax, with its slow, rolling screens and antediluvian graphics, as something rather comical. But for its day, it was extraordinary. The engineering team that developed the service was honoured with a Queen’s award for enterprise, and the technology involved was the blueprint for similar services across Europe. Ceefax’s commitment to getting information to viewers as quickly and clearly as possible was also marked by a lifetime achievement award from the Plain English Campaign.
Ultimately, Ceefax was a triumph of creativity, both journalistic and technological. It was driven by passion and dedication, two qualities that are still evident when talking to Gallagher today. “I adored it – it’s one of the happiest times of my life,” he says. “It was very alive. You felt you were at the centre of everything going on.”
