I still remember my first exposure to teletext. Â It would have been the early eighties when I went to visit one of my uncles. Â He had just got a new TV (which he rented from Radio Rentals) and it made our TV at home look old fashioned. Â Whereas our TV had big push buttons to change channels and was encased in wood, my uncles new telly was made of plastic and came with a remote control.
This was the first time I had ever seen a remote control, and I was initially fascinated how this little box, with no wire connecting it to the TV, could switch the channels. Â Impressed, my jaw hit the ground when my uncle pressed one of the other buttons and BBC1 was replaced by a page of text with the magical sounding word CEEFAX written in big yellow letters across the top.
Ten minutes later I had learned how this amazing new feature worked, and I spent the rest of that evening glued to the TV exploring all the various pages available. Â My excitement grew when I realised that flicking the TV over to ITV gave me a whole new set of pages called ORACLE to explore. Â When it became time to go home, I didn’t want to leave, and spent most of the journey home asking Mum and Dad if we could get a TV with teletext.
Teletext services were originally invented back in the early 1970’s though, when the TV companies were looking to find a way to provide written captions for the hard of hearing.  The BBC were first to the market with the CEEFAX service (see facts – geddit) but ITV followed soon after with their ORACLE offering (which was an acronym for the rather long winded and technical sounding name Optional Reception of Announcements by Coded Line Electronics).  It wasn’t until the 1980’s though that enough people had TV sets capable of displaying the teletext pages that things really took off.
So how does teletext work then? Â Well, in those days the teletext information was sent as part of the TV signal during the space between frames. Â Between each frame of a television picture there is a period called the vertical blanking period. Â This time is needed for the TV set to return the electron beam gun inside it back to the top left of the screen. Â During this time a page of information could be encoded and sent, and the TV set could decode and display it.
Since only a small amount of data could be sent in the vertical blanking period this was why you had to sit and wait for your chosen page to appear, as all pages were sent in a repeating loop one after another, which could be seen by the page number display at the top of the screen that kept incrementing and then starting again.
When Channel 4 started broadcasting they launched their own service called 4-Tel, and this quickly became a favourite with kids. Â CEEFAX always had a few kids pages but 4-Tel had loads more, with puzzles, games, news and best of all a cartoon strip. Â It may have been crudely drawn given the graphical capabilities of teletext, but the adventures of 4-T the dog became compulsive viewing. Â 4-Tel also had a rather good videogames magazine called Digitiser, which was written in quite an entertaining style, and wasn’t afraid to tell you when a new game was rubbish!
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I remember Paramount Comedy Channel’s text service being good in the late 90s. Episode guides to all their series up !
OMG, OMG!!! 4-T!! boy, does that bring back memories! I remember the days when I had nothing better to do than wait for 4-Tel to come on
I can’t believe you actually remembered him! You have made my day!!
My pleasure MeeToo. 4-T was cool wasn’t he (if a little blocky)
Teletext still fascinates me to this day, and I have no clue why. This modern ‘interactive TV’ simply doesn’t cut it with me.
Stumbled and Reddited. :>)
4-T was essential daily viewing in our house. Ahh yes, nostalgia’s not what it used to be!
Cool, for a good read about the development and technical aspects of Teletext find a copy of ‘Teletext and Viewdata’ by Steve A. Money which was published by Newnes Press.
I quite agree with hindleyite, good old teletext seems much friendlier and more information packed than the new digital teletext services.
I think you appreciated the BBC Micro Mode 7 graphics much more because of the effort involved in making something look good with the limitations imposed, something which the guys who did 4-T were masters of.
Boo: I think that must be it. It seems there’s more of an achievement when you create something cool under such restrictions, and the modern stuff just looks horrible with its slow-loading photo quality adverts.
Digitiser was fantastic.
YOU ******* TELETEXT EXISTED IN THE 1990s. I DIDN’T HAVE THE INTERNET IN THE 1990s AND I WAS A CHILD IN THE 1990s STOP MAKING ******* STEREOTYPES OR KILL YOURSELF
Calm down! I don’t think we ever said teletext wasn’t still available in the 1990s… It was actually still available as late as 2009 apparently!