And that’s it: the end of an era.

Teletext’s news and information service is switching off on December 14/15. Teletext.co.uk “Untitled Page”

For readers outside the UK, teletext is — was — a text based service available through the telly. It had TV listings, news, sport and stuff all available to read, in chunky 1980s era graphics (which haven’t changed, scoring it bonus nostalgia points). If I recall correctly, Oracle Teletext was also specifically the service provided by ITV on their channels: the BBC’s equivalent was called ‘Ceefax’, but basically the name ‘Teletext’ was the one which caught on.

And it looked something like this…

(This is BBC’s Ceefax page 302 represented on-screen, taken from the appropriate Ceefax.TV page — although to be honest it does look as though it’s not updated as often as the real Ceefax. If you’re from Ceefax TV and you’d like me not to use your image, let me know and I’ll take it down)

Basically, you switched the TV to ‘text’, which presented you with a black screen with the text on, although still provided the audio for the channel you were on, and then used your remote to enter the page number you wanted (theoretically 100-999, although in practice there were only a few hundred pages in use), and then the text appeared on the screen (although of course you couldn’t see your programme). Some TVs had a ‘mix’ option which allowed you to view the teletext as on overlay to the current programme, effectively rendering the program unwatchable and the text unreadable at the same time, in what was seen as a ‘feature’.

You could waste time reading all sorts of crap when you should have been doing something else. In this way, it’s possible to see teletext as a sort of a proto-internet.

Anyone who has owned a TV with teletext will probably remember certain of the numbers without ever needing to be prompted: the BBC’s football pages were on 302; subtitles could be available on any channel by pressing 888, News was 101 on BBC or 301 on ITV and so on.

The Gary Lineker quote above was a reflection of standard practice for the legions of football addicts around the country. You simply key into the text page for the scores of the division you were interested in, and the page would update regularly so you would be kept in touch with any changes to the scoreline. This was of course in the days when live sport was frequently shown on telly on a saturday afternoon, instead of talking heads like Matt Le Tissier pulling faces and regularly trying to describe the sitter Didier Drogba’s just missed.

And so all of us, most of us, or at very lesst many of us who weren’t actually at the match would regularly check the scores of our favourite teams (and the others in the division, natch’) on the teletext service to see if, despite years of evidence to the contrary, your team was going to manage to come back from 3-1 down.

And, in reference to the beautiful game, and how it should be played (for the Allardyces and Sounesses out there, I’ll explain: passing the ball to one another rather than just randomly lumping it downfield and hoping someone would score), Gary Lineker actually made a rude and hurtful remark about Wimbledon (as was), indicating that their style of play was so boring to watch that:

I’d rather watch them on TeletextGary Lineker

…hence the post title.

I’m not the only one who’s going to miss teletext either:

Teletext boiled football down to its essentials, the scoreline. Romance, florid descriptions and tactical analysis counted for nothing next to the result. It couldn’t tell you anything about performance or players and in those days you were unlikely to find team line-ups anywhere unless you bought the Sunday People. Before such information became commonplace, it equally satisfied the urges of football junkies and those for whom a Saturday afternoon would not be complete without a fixed-odds coupon.The Guardian: Sport Blog

And it’s all switching off in a couple of days. Well, technically, not all of it. They’re keeping some of the bits which were neither use nor ornament to me — such as teletext holidays — presumably because these actually might generate some revenue. But the stuff that I actually found useful will all be gone.

So farewell then teletext. We salute you.

…but not that much (yet) as fortunately the BBC Ceefax service was better for the football anyway, and I am led to believe that this will be clinging on grimly until the final demise of the analogue TV signals in 2012.