Making a Spectacle Simon Brattel on the story behind Dark Star’s amusing B-side

Dark Star and Forbidden Planet’s flipsides both contain an irreverent program mocked up to look like the teletext pages of the time. Essentially a platform for Design Design to make fun of anybody it disliked, Simon explains how it happened. “The first adverts for the Spectrum made a fuss over the fact it was a colour computer, with colour graphics, and basically implying you could do teletext on it as a sales thing. Actually you couldn’t, because teletext could do a higher resolution than on the Spectrum, so it sort of occurred to me that, as a pisstake, we could do something that looked like it. I was getting a bit bored coding Dark Star, so I knocked up this little editor and just started putting funny pages into it. But I didn’t really have the time to do it properly, so Martin Horsley, bless him, liked the idea and wandered off one weekend. He wrote all the code and dumped it on my desk, which was bloody brilliant of him, before Simon Jackson and I wrote all the pages. We never resisted the opportunity to take the piss.”