Icons
Icon of the month: Ceefax
Sarah Dean
![Ceefax.jpg]()
In October, analogue television will be switched off in Northern
Ireland, completing the digital switchover for the whole of the UK.
This new dawn of better pictures, more channels and greater
interaction marks the end of Ceefax.
The BBC began broadcasting its Ceefax service in 1974. For
several years engineers had been developing a text transmission
service to provide closed caption subtitling for deaf and
hearing-impaired viewers. Using the ‘spare’ lines of a
television broadcast, engineers found they were able to send text
files quickly and efficiently. Having proved that this process
required no additional bandwidth and had no impact on picture
quality, BBC executives decided to use the system to make other
information available to viewers as text files, enabling viewers to
‘see facts’ – hence the name.
The initial service contained 30 pages of simple linear
information such as stock and farming prices as well as subtitles
and news. Within two years Ceefax had doubled the number of pages
it offered which included a children’s page and ‘a shopping guide
for housewives’.
As its popularity grew the BBC news department recruited staff
to work solely on Ceefax’s news output, recognising that the
service was not just a complimentary add-on for its output, but an
integral part of its current affairs broadcasting, available to
viewers 24 hours a day.
By the early 80s, the growing use of teletext by TV stations
around the world made it possible for correspondents with the right
technical support to update their local system remotely. The BBC
used this technology for the first time during the 1980 Moscow
Olympics, when a BBC correspondent at the Olympic stadium put the
day’s results directly into the Ceefax system. Seconds later these
results were available to viewers across the UK.
Making a change to a teletext page is fast, as the system does
not require pages to be uploaded so changes are almost instant.
Over the years Ceefax and its commercial siblings ITV Oracle and
4tel have often been the first place that news stories have broken,
for example Ceefax was the first UK news source to confirm Princess
Diana’s death at 4am on a Sunday morning in 1997. However there
have been problems with such an instant system. In 1994
during a BBC news department rehearsal for the death of the Queen,
Ceefax news pages were publicly updated with the news of the
monarch’s demise. These pages were taken down in 30 seconds, and an
apology was posted, but several thousand people were thought to
have read the story.
By the mid 90s there were 2.5 million teletext-enabled
televisions in the UK. More than a third of the population
was checking teletext at least once a week and Ceefax was hosting
2,000 pages of content. Over on ITV the commercial broadcasters
paid for their teletext services by hosting content from
advertisers. Their most visited pages were Teletext Holidays, which
before the internet were the best place to get a cheap flight or a
last minute holiday.
The teletext system is not affected by the number of viewers
accessing a page, so even as the internet began to take hold as a
primary source for breaking news, Ceefax continued to play a vital
role. During the 9/11 and 7/7 attacks online news sites crashed due
to being overwhelmed traffic, at which point Ceefax became a
reliable and up-to-the-minute source for both the public and
broadcast journalists.
The bulk of Ceefax’s content is already available via the Red
Button on digital television. Sadly the Red Button pages won’t be
illustrated by blocky and at times indecipherable graphic
illustrations, planned out on graph paper by computer programmers.
But viewers no longer have to remember a random three digit number
to access the information they require, and finding out football
results won’t require a nail biting wait for 24 pages to scroll
round to the one with your team on it.
In the 80s 2,000 pages of information seemed overwhelming. Now a
Google search for ‘Ceefax’ comes up with 557,000 results. Ceefax’s
time has come. There is a season, turn, turn, turn – except with
Ceefax gone you don’t have to wait 10 minutes for the page to
actually do that.
