FROM THE ARCHIVE OF: The TV Room
The celebrations last week to mark the 50th anniversary of Ceefax may have been a surprise to some people.
Was Ceefax really thar old?
Ceefax did indeed start in 1974 but for several years it really was a Cinderella service.
When the service started, it was in effect a test project. Sets with teletext were not readily available.
The BBC Archive feed has previously posted items about Ceefax from Blue Peter and Pebble Mill at One. It is interesting that both these pieces appear to presume their viewers have no previous knowledge of the service whatsoever.
It seems that proper promotion of Ceefax started about 1978 although it is difficult to identify an exact date. Radio Times started to give examples of information available on Ceefax in the footnotes of billings.
By then, sets with teletext were becoming more readily available to rent or buy. ITV was also starting to push its ORACLE service.
It was also around this time that the first experiments with Ceefax subtitles took place. A recent Kaleidoscope video showed they were produced for Blankety Blank in autumn 1979.
The most obvious move to promote Ceefax came in March 1980 when Ceefax In-Vision started -unadvertised and usually in the half-hour leading up to trade test transmissions, Ceefax did start to be noticed.
In particular Ceefax was shown for 30 minutes before any BBC Two start-up between around 2pm and 4pm in the period after transmitters were switched back on.
Gradually Ceefax replaced regular daytime screenings of the test card. There doesn’t seem to be an official date for a changeover but it would appear a significant point was reached around April 1983.
A printers’ strike meant Radio Times was not being published so Presentation went to quite an effort to provide more schedule information than usual.
This seems to have included keeping Ceefax on screen during all the periods where the test card would normally have been shown.
The move became permanent and was confirmed in January 1984 when RT started billing Pages from Ceefax during daytime gaps – not closedowns.
Teletext sets were growing in popularity but were still only possessed by a minority. It took until the 1990s for teletext to be fitted as standard in most sets and this was when the medium hit its height of popularity.
Just to tackle an internet myth, Ceefax was never shown regularly late at night until 1995.
Screenings in overnight gaps were for special reasons – very late openings for the Olympics or decisions to keep transmitters open for special reasons (e.g., extremely cold weather).
Although never confirmed, it is presumed the transmitters were kept open all night in the early stages of the 1991 Gulf War in case of an overnight emergency or urgent breaking story.
The first routine late night Ceefax screening came with the start of The Learning Zone in the autumn of 1995. Ceefax filled the gap after the last programme in the main BBC Two schedule.
Not long after, Ceefax got its third major revamp and then regional pages were introduced. But this is the point in the story where Ceefax enters decline leading to its gradual closure as analogue transmission ended.
It is interesting though that the BBC still hasn’t shut the Red Button text service – reprieved as a temporary measure at the start of the pandemic in 2020.
It may be on borrowed time but there seems to be no rush to finally pull the plug.
Acknowledgements
PICTURED: Ceefax In-Vision (9th December 1980). COURTESY: data recovered by The Teletext Archaeologist. COPYRIGHT: BBC.
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