Text appeal: Ceefax recreated by 20-year-old Northern Irish man
If you find news websites too overwhelming, too fast and too full of distractions then this might be the solution: a recreation of the BBC’s Ceefax service featuring up-to-date headlines, an accurate weather map and the latest stock market prices.
Nathan Dane, 20, has spent the last six years building a simulation of the BBC’s defunct text-based information service. It takes in data from the BBC’s existing website and repurposes it in the distinctively blocky font that was ubiquitous on television sets during the 1980s and 1990s.
“It’s as close a recreation as I can make it,” said Dane from his home in Enniskillen, Northern Ireland, where he has a separate screen at his desk for showing news headlines from his recreation of Ceefax.
“I do find it really useful myself. If I’m sitting in work eating my lunch I can just stick that on and get up to date. You’re not flicking about between websites – you have all the information you need on a page but without all the distraction.” At its peak, tens of millions of Britons used BBC Ceefax and its commercial equivalent, Teletext, to check news headlines, find travel information or wait an infuriatingly long time for a quiz answer to be revealed.
Individual stories were often split across multiple pages, meaning it could take minutes to fully comprehend an article if you were unlucky enough to load halfway through a piece. Only a few sentences of text fitted on each screen, forcing writers to develop the skills to produce concise stories.
But the limitations and slowness of a system designed in 1974 may be increasingly attractive in a world of unlimited choice, while the cluttered advertising-heavy designs of many modern websites have made people nostalgic for the simplicity of Ceefax.
The BBC closed the original Ceefax service as part of the transition to digital television broadcasts, with Northern Ireland being the last region of the UK to lose access.
“We had Ceefax in this part of the world until 2012, which is probably the only reason I remember it,” said Dane, who works for a digital signage company. “I have a great interest in all the old broadcast-TV type stuff. It’s really the service that I remember looking through when I was wee.”
Dane’s recreation features a weather map (page 401) based on data from the Met Office that accurately recreates the current forecast on a map of the UK using the limited Ceefax colour palette.
The Premier League football table (page 324) is up to date. A selection of national, foreign and local stories can be accessed through the headlines section (page 101).
Some fans have also set up YouTube streams looping through Ceefax pages with muzak in the background, recreating the way the BBC used to fill overnight schedules on its channels.
The small but thriving online Teletext community, which is centred on a group on the chat service Discord, already helps run a separate long-running service called Teefax – although it does not use the same BBC styling.
There are also dozens of teletext artists who challenge themselves to use the limited colour palette. One of them, Dan Farriond, said: “It’s a great gateway because it’s very simple, it’s built on 1970s technology, it’s simple to get your head around technology-wise. It’s the pure aesthetic of it and the simplicity. You only have a limited number of colours. A lot of the design decisions are made for you.”
Dane, who runs his Ceefax server from his home, said his service was remarkably stable. When Facebook went offline in November he proudly tweeted a story about Mark Zuckerberg’s company with the caption: “Ceefax, however, remains unaffected.”