Here we go. After yesterday’s video version, here’s the good old Web 1.0 write-up for…

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4: Pages from Ceefax

(Shown 6491 times, 1983-2000)

Well, here’s a controversial one. Partly because you could claim it’s not really a programme, partly because you could claim it should be classed as ‘news’, and partly because pages from Ceefax aired in-vision for a few years before ever being billed. So, in turn, (a) it was billed as such, so I’m counting it as such, (b) for the most part, it was more of a television magazine a la Town and Around, and (c) I know, but it didn’t start getting billed in the Radio Times until 1983. And not as ‘Pages from Ceefax’ until a year after that.

(Side Point: at this point in the list, I do feel a bit torn. I always wanted to include Pages From Ceefax in the rundown, but I’ve seen a few people suggest Newsnight will be in the Top Ten. And perhaps it should be – it leans more towards the likes of Tonight or 24 Hours than a standalone BBC news programme. Personally, on nailing down the 100 programmes being covered in the list, I leant more on the side of “Newsnight is the BBC’s equivalent of Channel Four News” and duly excluded it from the rundown. Perhaps I should have included it. Maybe I should even have given up this place in the list to Newsnight. But: I’m not going to, as Ceefax is (along with associated services Oracle or 4-Tel) a unique part of British TV history, so it’s worth affording it some space. Frankly, you’re just lucky I didn’t engineer a way to include BBC Select somewhere. More of that later.)

Part of this might just be (okay, definitely is) down to the way Ceefax absolutely fascinated me as a small child. My main two obsessions in those formative years were reading and television. It being the dawn of the 1980s, and my location being a small Welsh village, the tiny local newsagent could only provide so many copies of Nutty, The Beano or, obviously, the Radio- and TV Times. There was no internet (yes, technically there was, but our local buses didn’t go anywhere near Stanford University), but come 12 March 1980 there was something new to read. Not necessarily about telly. But actually on the telly.

I don’t think I realised that at the time, mind you. It probably would have been at some point in 1981, at which time my parents had won themselves a black-and-white portable TV – one of the really old ones with a dial used to tune into channels instead of buttons – meaning we were now a two-telly family. Yes, you’re right to look impressed. I got to bring it to my bedroom to watch the episode of The Sweeney with Morecambe and Wise in it and everything. And, with it back in its natural home of the kitchen, where I suspect it was partially being used for a musical background to everyday kitchen tasks, on first seeing the captivating sentence “a selection of items of news and information from Ceefax”, I was utterly mesmerised.

Telly was still only on for a limited number of hours each day, and kids’ telly for even fewer hours, but there was something new: ‘secret’ telly, hidden outside the TV listings. And not just the BBC Engineering Information (which I was inexplicably terrified of) – my interest was piqued to the point where after we’d finished our tea, I’d ask to go to the kitchen and watch Ceefax In Vision on my own. It was all reading, so my parents were on board, but I don’t think I was especially keen to see the latest FTSE index, it was more that I was utterly fascinated by the general concept of it.

Apart from the scary sun-face that came up before the weather. I was only six years old at the time, of course.

Anyway, moving onto matters that aren’t about repressed childhood trauma, what’s the deal with Ceefax? What was poured into that 40 by 24 grid of characters that characterised the one-way pseudo-web of the 1980s?

The first rumblings in the national press for the service seem to have been in the Daily Telegraph in October 1972 (“Push-button news for TV invented by BBC”, with reporter Sean Day-Lewis bigging up the potential for instant news summaries, sports results and stock market prices. At this stage, the mooted end product was to be a small box with “a number of push buttons”, behind which would be up to thirty pages ready to be displayed on the television screen. Given it hadn’t yet been three years since colour television first arrived on BBC1, it really showed how the BBC Research Department were keen on earning those salaries. Trials were set to begin in the summer of 1973, with an aim of going into production “within two or three years”, with a mooted cost of between £65 and £85 (that’s £735 to £962 adjusted for inflation) for the set-top box needed to decode those hidden bits.

With prices like that expected at launch, the BBC’s research team were realistic about their initial target audience. “Ceefax would mean that the farmer can come home from the pub and get a weather forecast on his set at the press of a button (…) the investor could choose the page of stock market prices and see whether he can go to bed with a peaceful mind”.

1973 saw an initial test service sneaked onto the airwaves, with the trial running for seven days per week from September 1974. A year later, the service was deemed settled enough to warrant an effective ‘launch programme’, with Tuesday July 15th 1975 seeing the transmission of Angela Rippon-fronted This is Ceefax, airing on BBC-1 at 10:45pm.

Previous to that point, the number of sets in British homes was unlikely to be far into three figures (and even then, mainly in homes belonging to BBC engineers). At the time of the programme, Ceefax had it’s own specially built – if modest – newsroom on the seventh floor of TV Centre. Editor/journalist Colin McIntyre led a small team (comprising four subeditors and four research assistants) in a delightfully 1970s BBC broom cupboard, where a series of machines (likely worth the aggregate annual licence fee tally of Derbyshire) would clatter out yards of teleprint from news agencies, which would then be bashed into a VDU featuring a distinctly unhelpful mid-70s GUI.

The research assistants on the team also enjoyed the task of seeing what else Ceefax could be used for, aside from the obvious likes of News, Weather and Financial Gubbins. So, at this early stage, beach news, shopping guides (advising on fluctuations in fruit prices and the like), train timetables or – yes! – the latest Canal News all made an appearance.

It’s worth noting that This is Ceefax wasn’t the first time the service had been featured on BBC-1. Sunday 8 June 1975 saw an episode of I See What You Mean, a ten-episode series serving hearing-impaired people, with the final episode of the run featuring the subtitling possibilities of Ceefax. This broadcast also led to a brief write-up of the ‘fax in that week’s Sunday Times, which references the presence of a working Ceefax setup in the lobby of BBC-TV Centre, which visitors were encouraged to explore.

And of course, that would be as close as most could get to enjoying the full on-screen magazine. As such, nice as it was to show off the BBC’s latest invention, in those early years there was little point in putting Ceefax on-screen as a marketing ploy. Only the most precious of few people could stand a chance of affording access to it, after all.

If you need an example to back that up, how about this: one of the few shops you could visit to buy a teletext-equipped set? Harrods. A bargain at just £1,049, a mere £5,890 when adjusted for inflation. For the record, for that adjusted outlay nowadays, you could buy a 98-inch 4K Samsung set from Currys, rather than a modest 22-inch set from 1977. But: does that 98-inch set have teletext? No, it does not.

Despite the modest number of homes with Ceefax receivers, the BBC weren’t wholly beholden from mentioning where the service came into play. As the service grew, readers of the Radio Times were informed of how Ceefax could provide auxiliary information for then.

The listing for Saturday 11 March 1978 saw the first reference to horse racing results being available on the service in the listing for Grandstand. The same evening saw the billing for Match of the Day casually mentioning it was a good place to dip into full classified football results, along with pools news.

The following Thursday (16 March 1978) saw the billing for Top of the Pops mention that the Top 20 could be dialled up on page 156, while the white-hot heat of technological improvement even reached the garden on Wednesday 22 March 1978, as page 145’s Gardening News was dropped into the listing for the debut of splendidly-titled Mr Smith Propagates Plants. The following evening’s billing for the Evening News (read by early adopter Angela Rippon) even pointed out that weather maps could be found on P111. Saturday 22 April 1978 saw the first Ceefax pages dedicated to that evening’s Eurovision Song Contest (on P156, if you’re a time traveller), while the same month also saw the introduction of a page dedicated to detailing materials needed for each day’s Play School make. The march of technological progress even took in July 1978’s World Chess Championship, with Ceefax playing host to summaries of play throughout the tournament.

By 1980 however, it was decided that the price of teletext receivers was finally within the financial grasp of many more Britons, not least considering many people preferred to rent TV sets, avoiding a major one-off outlay. And so, half-hour chunks of Ceefax started to be transmitted during some of the programme-free intervals that punctuated each day’s broadcasting. They weren’t being billed in the Radio Times or newspaper TV listings, and was referred to by continuity and on-screen as ‘Ceefax In Vision’, but those pages from Ceefax were finally going out to the nation.

The following year, the service was promoted even further. October 1981 was declared National Teletext Month, a promotion that saw flyers and posters promoting the service, with cabinet minister Kenneth Baker imploring the British public to take a closer look. A glance through the newspaper archives suggests it barely made a dent in the national newspapers, but it did at least warrant a few mentions in regional publications such as The Scotsman, the Aberdeen Press and Journal, and a rare appearance for teletext in the London Illustrated News:

Of course, the good old Radio Times also stepped up to the plate, with Teletext Month even getting a corner strapline on one of the more infamous RT covers of the decade.

Sadly, National Teletext Month failed to rock the nation. While 1982 and 1983 saw further attempts at the themed month, press coverage seems to have been limited to adverts for companies trying to sell text-equipped sets, rather than any actual column inches. If only they’d given an entire weekend of BBC2’s airtime to Ceefax In Vision. That would have sorted it.

March 1983 saw pages from Ceefax finally being billed in the Radio Times and national press programme listings. BBC1 woke up each morning at 6am with half an hour of news, sport and travel information from the service going out under the guise of Ceefax AM, while the Breakfast Time studio readied itself for broadcasting to the nation at 6.30am. Basically, this was a low-cost rival to TV-am’s Daybreak opener, only with ITN newsreaders substituted with a smattering of BBC Micro Mode 7 magic. So, a cheap version of what TV-am were doing. But still, those pages from Ceefax were finally in the listings.

Ceefax AM even had cause to break important news to the nation before anyone else. The 1983 Election coverage saw the early morning Ceefax service bridging the gap between a 4am screening of Leslie Philips flick Crooks Anonymous and an earlier-than-normal Breakfast Time, with the teletext stalwart bringing viewers the latest election results at 5.15am that day. Sadly, that’s yet to feature in any BBC Parliament bank holiday rebroadcast of old election coverage. For shame.

Saturday 7 January 1984 was a landmark date in TV history: for the first time, at 9am on BBC2, to fill some time before Open University rolled up the shutters for the morning, there was the first Radio Times and newspaper billing for the now-rechristened Pages From Ceefax. Rejoice! Knocking on for ten years since the first trials of the service, it was now in the big time, rubbing shoulders with the likes of, erm, Daytime on Two, From Petroleum to Polyethylene and Frank Muir’s popular game of musical knowledge My Music.

This was where Pages from Ceefax’s imperial phase truly began, finding itself spread across the schedules like jam on a crumpet for the next few years. It even occasionally served as an eight-minute 3.45pm buffer on several occasions between live weekday afternoon sport and the pre-Children’s BBC regional news bulletin, when surely it would have made more sense to throw on a Tom and Jerry. Such was Ceefax’s role as Official Interval-Filler to the Corporation, not even a mouse with dynamite could shift it.

While Full Fat Ceefax had grown so far as to offer actual software downloads on teletext-equipped sets by this point, the broadcast version was still largely restricted to news, sport, weather and outliers like recipes, TV listings, motoring news and film reviews. In the pre-web age, that was certainly enough to pique the interest of casual viewers, and if nothing else ensured I kept badgering my parents to buy a TV set with built-in teletext every time our existing Grundig started to get a bit wobbly.

1984 saw another new avenue for Ceefax. With the Summer Olympics taking place in Los Angeles, and as such live Olympic coverage running into the larger of the wee small hours, the BBC transmitters were kept warm between the end of live action from LA and the start of Olympic Breakfast Time by putting out Ceefax Olympics AM, offering even more overnight news from the USA for the hardcore Olympiad ultras.

Throughout 1985 and 1986, Ceefax continued to grout the gaps between programming on BBCs One and Two, but changes were afoot. Late 1986 saw the introduction of proper daytime programming on BBC1, meaning that after 24 October 1986, the service would subsequently only appear in Ceefax AM clothing on the Beeb’s flagship channel. Plus, by this point, Channel 4’s equivalent offering – 4-Tel/Oracle On View – was pumping out a much more varied selection of pages, from news to the marvellous Blue Suede Views section (including record reviews packed with character, genre pop charts) to live flight information from British Airways. On top of that, the 4-Tel portion of each broadcast included (limited) animation on interstitial slides. Pages from Ceefax were starting to look a bit stuffy by comparison.

It really took until 1988 before the BBC could start the fightback, with the tentative roll-out of Level Two teletext for the broadcast version of Ceefax. More colours! Animation! An attempt at a serif font that was a bit harder to read! This would go on to be used more heavily in the 1990s – and was exclusive to the broadcast version of the service, as Level 2 teletext decoders never took off in the UK – before the service sensibly reeled in the graphical showboating and retained the more traditional Level 1 Ceefax look in 1996.

By the time the 1990s rolled around, there was less room for Pages from Ceefax in the printed schedules. Other than 6am outings on BBC1 each weekday before BBC Breakfast News (by now trading as Pages from Ceefax rather than Ceefax AM), plus filling the 9am gap on BBC2 between Westminster and schools programmes. By 1991, only the pre-Breakfast News broadcasts were being billed, and within a few years of that, Pages from Ceefax were back to being an almost entirely unbilled surprise for viewers with irregular sleep patterns. 

Look, here’s a big table showing a full breakdown of when Pages from Ceefax was listed in the Radio Times.

That solitary showing from 2000 is a curious little fellow, a twenty-minute burst of Mode 7 on an August Bank Holiday morning at 7am, before BBC2 viewers were able to enjoy a cracking double bill of A Day at the Races and The Great Dictator.

Of course, this wasn’t the end of Ceefax, or even Pages From it. They were simply no longer being billed in the Radio Times (or in newspaper TV listings) at this stage. And that makes sense, given by the mid-90s it was hard to buy a television that didn’t already have built-in teletext. Pages from was still airing throughout those years – for example, despite never being billed in the listings during 1995, there are several uploads of it on YouTube – but overnight hours at the time were mainly filled with another, less-remembered BBC pet project, BBC Select.

The option of paying for a descrambler to ‘unlock’ broadcasts that absolutely nobody was about to start pirating surprisingly wasn’t that popular (now comprising stuff like training videos for lawyers or recordings of company AGMs, rather than the initially proposed selection of TV classics), and BBC Select faded from view in 1995, replaced with the BBC Learning Zone. Happily, that’s where Pages from Ceefax would step back up to the plate, being employed to bridge the gap between the end of regular BBC Two programming and the start of Learning Zone content.

A greater challenge to Ceefax’s prominence on the nocturnal broadcast spectrum came in November 1997, when the launch of BBC News 24 meant BBC One’s overnight hours were now filled with flag-filled idents and actual newsreaders taking the place of Ceefax news pages. Ceefax still had a place on BBC Two, albeit almost entirely unbilled.

As it would transpire, the last ever example of a billed broadcast of Pages from Ceefax would be an outing on BBC Two Northern Ireland on Thursday 19 February 2009. That’s a regional broadcast, so it’s not being included in our total, but at least it warranted a page on the BBC website.

The last ever Pages from Ceefax went out on 22 October 2012, on BBC Two at the appropriately unfriendly time of 4:45am. The end of an era, but it did warrant a proper send off by the continuity announcer, plus a farewell caption card at the end. Plus (and thanks to Chart Update’s James Masterton for this nugget), the final piece of accompanying music (don’t diminish it with the word ‘muzak’) was the fine choice of BART by US outfit Tom Fogerty + Ruby, which will likely be very familiar to anyone who’d grown up with the BBC’s grab-bag of Test Card/Schools/Pages from Ceefax audio over the previous 25 years.

The following evening, the ‘proper’ Ceefax service finally came to an end. With Northern Ireland switching off its analogue transmitters and completing the transition to a fully-digital UK, there was no longer any analogue signal left for those Ceefax bits to hide in. However, some things are too beautiful to ever truly die, and the spirit of Ceefax lives on through projects such as Nathan Dane’s RSS-based Ceefax reboot, Raspberry Pi teletext tribute Teefax (which got a shout out on The One Show), and an entire online community based around the art of teletext art. There have even been annual teletext art festivals taking place at locations ranging from Berlin to Cambridge.

I’m loathe to use the word ‘iconic’, but the distinctive look and feel of the teletext layout – no matter which country a particular service originates from (and there are, of course, many) – instantly feels welcoming, a throwback to an age where information wasn’t available on tap via the electronic oblong in everyone’s pocket, where those of a certain generation could dial up news, sport, weather and the latest canal news whenever they wanted. This was our very own eight-colour future, and Pages from Ceefax was, for many, the Tardis door to it.

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Okay, now that’s out there, here’s a bit more bonus content from Paul R Jackson, with some added information on those Blue Peter reunions. Over to you, Paul!

An update re: the Blue Peter Returns Anniversary info sent in. For the 30th anniversary (17/10/88), I don’t have Sarah G down on film. For the 40th anniversary, Lesley was missing too.

For the 50th anniversary, there was a tea party held at Buckingham Palace, on 15/10/08, with HM The Queen.

Nine former presenters were present: Valerie Singleton, John Noakes, Peter Purves, Lesley Judd, Simon Groom, Diane-Louise Jordan, Katy Hill, Konnie Huq and Matt Baker , plus two current presenters: Helen Skelton & Joel Defries. For this event, presenters had to have served at least five years. The then-current editor had missed Peter Duncan off list as he did his over two stints.

A 50th anniversary party was held at the Science Museum on 16/10/08 – 27 presenters out of a possible 34 attended the 50th Anniversary photo shoot (seven were missing from the shoot – the late Trace, Sundin & Keating, while four weren’t available – Curry, Fielding, D’Annunzio & Bacon).

Paul has also kindly provided some photos from those presenter shoots.

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Okay, there are just three programmes left, and the savvy amongst you may well have already worked out what they are. But in which order will they come? And what will I find to write about them? Luckily for me, there’s a lot more background info about the next item on the list – expect more soon!