The joy of Ceefax Rev Steve Morris

Ceefax lives on! Well, in a way.

This autumn, the BBC reversed plans to drop its ‘redbutton’ text information service. This was the successor to Ceefax, the world’s first teletext information service, launched in 1974. By 1982, two million British TVS were Ceefax-ready.

In the ’60s, BBC engineers Geoff Larkby and Barry Pyatt first developed a printable information page that could function while the BBC wasn’t on air. Ceefax launched with just 30 pages on offer. This mushroomed to include news, sport, racing, horoscopes, holiday tips and even live flight times. It was the place where big stories like the Gulf War broke. You keyed in a three-digit number to get your subject – sport was 300 and entertainment 500.

It all came to an end on 23rd October 2012, the day of the last analogue signal in the UK. Athlete Mary Peters switched off the old signal.

There is a certain nostalgia value to the horrible clunky graphics and the garish colours (blue, white and black), which take us back to a less sophisticated time. There was a succinct quality: match reports in 80 words are an art form.

Ceefax pointed towards a new information age. But it wasn’t information overload. It was, to borrow a horrible modern term, ‘curated’. One minute, we found out that Fidel Castro had just appeared in public; the next, Leeds United were beating QPR.

The best thing was that it wasn’t interactive. It wasn’t clogged up by would-be journalists, keyboard heroes with an opinion on everything. It wasn’t about trolling or vitriol. It was a place where we could See Facts.