![]() I was just doing it in isolation I had no idea it meant so much to people. “I get a lot of Digitiser fans telling me that we shaped their sense of humour, or were there for them when growing up was tough,” Rose adds. “Digitiser is very much part of my DNA now, and a lot of people seem to remember it fondly, so I’m using the brand awareness to help fund little creative projects that I want to do. “I’m knocking on a bit now, and there’s no dignity in trying to start a YouTube career at my age. Ceefax followed in 2012 as Britain’s digital switchover was complete, bringing 38 years of broadcast to an end. But a series of wrangles saw Digitiser replaced by the more straight-laced GameCentral in 2003.Īnd as the rise of the internet continued unabated, Teletext was eventually switched off in December 2009 as its readership dwindled. Reports have it that Teletext’s senior editorial team didn’t have the stomach for the controversial computer games page but couldn’t shut it down due to its popularity. Certainly at first, I felt more comfortable writing in a way that I found funny than I was penning serious pieces.”Īt its peak, Digitiser was drawing in 1.5m readers every day. It just evolved that we’d write stuff that made us laugh. ![]() Tim had a very distinct, surreal way with words, and the two of us shared a similar sense of humour. “I’d grown up reading magazines such as Your Sinclair and Smash Hits, which had an irreverent, kind of disrespectful, style, and it just felt natural to emulate that. Hairs respectively) in 1993, Digitiser pegged itself as the ‘world’s first daily games magazine’ and quickly found an audience with its risque humour and brutally honest reviews. Nowhere was Teletext’s anarchic spirit better typified than on gaming page Digitiser.Ĭreated by Rose and Tim Moore (Mr. And you had to pick a side – were you a Ceefaxer or a Teletexter? A videprinter junkie or a Bamboozle addict?” to provide lighter, more entertaining content. “It was quickly established that you could trust Ceefax to deliver news, and Teletext Ltd. “At some point a line was drawn in the sand, and Ceefax’s modus operandi became ‘pure information and facts’,” says Farrimond. Are you a Ceefaxer or a Teletexter?īattlelines were drawn between the more austere Ceefax and the irreverent content on ITV and Channel 4’s Oracle which later became, simply, Teletext. You could book your holiday, read comics (Turner the Worm!), add closed captions onto TV programmes or get a letter printed on Chatterbox or the bizarre Mega-zine on Channel 4. While teletext found its way to North America and around the world, it was in Europe that its popularity boomed, particularly in the UK. “There was a similar thrill in waiting for cricket scores to update: 'Oh no, it hasn’t changed for a while now, maybe England have lost a wicket!' And invariably they’d lost two.”Īs teletext grew, it wasn’t just the news lines and football scores that built its proto-internet appeal. “I remember the excitement of having a teletext television in my bedroom because I could keep up with football scores in real time while waiting for commentary updates on local radio,” says Teletext artist Dan Farrimond. Hopefully with a new scorer appearing under their name. ![]() Just a score, a time and the agonising wait for your team’s page to roll back around. With its simple blue and white text on a black screen, it had none of the shrill chaos of Jeff Stelling and the gang, nor the immediate right to reply on social media. The third in our series looks at Teletext, the service where you could find the news, book holidays and read comic books.īefore there was Sky Sports, before Twitter and illicit streams on the internet, the thrill of following the football on a Saturday afternoon was brought by the endlessly rotating screen of Ceefax. In our new series, we'll take a look at the retro tech that shaped a generation. In an age before Facebook, when the Walkman was king and smartphone batteries lasted a week, anything seemed possible.
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