Norman Einstein's
ISSUE 08 (01/10)
"The Death Of Teletext"
by Fredorrarci
[Fredorrarci is based in Ireland. He blogs about sport in almost every of its beautiful forms at Sport Is a TV Show.]
This is not my first time contributing hereabouts, so I feel I can confide in you. If that's okay, I mean. Because there's been something bothering me, something I just have to divulge before the apt moment passes for good. I must lay my secret relationship bare for you to regard and judge as you must. This is the story of me, sport, and teletext.
Because the final world in that paragraph may have dumbfounded some of you in a looks-like-it-must-mean-something-but-I-can't-quite-place-it sort of way, allow me to enlighten your impoverished souls. Teletext is a text-based news and information service transmitted alongside analogue television signals. Each station may have their own teletext service: that of RTE, Ireland's state broadcaster, is called Aertel; the BBC's service is Ceefax. It is offered free of charge. It seems not to have taken root in North America. Just like Dexy's Midnight Runners - there was more to them than "Come On, Eileen," dammit! - in the States, or as an elementary particle in an atom smasher, teletext disappeared as soon as it materialised. In Britain and Ireland, however, it became its own cultural niche.
Teletext was a 1970s technology, and it has remained so. It looks awful. Eight-year-old ZX Spectrum programmers would doubtless have looked up from their computer screens back in the day and sneered at the ridiculous graphics the system was trying to render. (The weather maps are so pixellated, they make Britain and Ireland look like a quarrelling trailer trash couple on COPS.) But in the strange way these things go, this somehow imbues it with a certain charm. Just as some fetishise audio cassettes, just as there are enough Polaroid wonks out there to justify talk of a relaunch, just as I'm still using an at-death's-door VCR rather than become a DVR sellout, so the imperfect aesthetic of teletext is a point in its favour. Even if you don't consciously admire it, its lack of flash succeeds by not distracting you from the key to teletext - its facility of use. The user presses the "text" button on their remote control and keys in a three-digit number which corresponds to a particular page. Some of these pages are menus: 101 might be the news index, for example, or 600 that for the weather.
Naturally, sports news is catered to. In those hazily-recalled days before the internet became our unyielding lord and master, it was teletext that was our drip feed. It wasn't able to throttle us into submission with bombast like the wretched 24-hour rolling sports news channels of today. It was more insidious than that, drawing you in with its utter simplicity. You could check up on team news and those crucial anodyne pre-game press conference quotes without budging from your ass groove. It became a companion you couldn't do without. Come senility, telephone numbers, social security numbers, and address numbers will all have disappeared from memory, but the number of Ceefax's football index will remain.
(It's 302, by the way.)
Teletext has directly impacted football history after a fashion. In 1997, Bruce Rioch discovered that he has been sacked as assistant coach of Queen's Park Rangers when he checked Ceefax. The agent of itinerant nobody Roy Essandoh spotted a Ceefax story about lowly Wycombe Wanderers' chronic shortage of strikers and got his man a short-term deal at the club. Shortly afterwards, he came on as substitute in Wycombe's 2001 FA Cup quarter-final away to Premiership Leicester City and scored the winning goal, causing one of the great modern upsets of a competition which venerates them. In the mid-90s, a public feud developed between Gary Lineker - simpering golden boy of English football groomed by the BBC as their face of the sport - and Vinnie Jones - "footballer," "hard man," and future "star" of the silver screen. The dispute began when Lineker criticised the unappealing style of Jones's team, Wimbledon Football Club. Said Jones, "The best way to watch Wimbledon is on Ceefax."
Ouch.
You see, here's where the confession comes in. Because teletext is no mere news service - it has served as a rite of passage for football fans, a definitive marker of obsession. Once upon a time, in that epoch before you could watch pretty much any game you liked on a TV or a computer - legitimately or otherwise - you could either hope that it was the featured game on the radio, or if it wasn't... well, you could watch it on teletext.
"Watching a game on teletext" is inaccurate, of course. What it actually involves is tuning into the page on which the information for the match in question is being transmitted and waiting for it to update. The information is scant: if you're very lucky, the starting line-ups will be shown; otherwise, it's just the scoreline, the scorers, and the minutes in which the goals are scored. That is, if any goals are scored. This is football after all - you may very well end up waiting an hour and a half for precisely nothing to happen. At least if you're watching a cricket match, which may last six hours a day for five days, stuff happens (albeit slowly): runs are scored, wickets are taken, bowlers are changed, and so on. Watch a box score in one of your American pastimes get updated live and you notice that stuff happens.
This is different. Elsewhere at Norman Einstein's, I have suggested that it is my addiction to drama that is key to my love of sport. Watching a soccer game on teletext is to distil this drama to a neat, maddening form. By being reduced to waiting on a score update without the context the action provides, the feeling of helplessness that underpins all fandom becomes even more pronounced. You become a young couple waiting to see if the stick will turn blue, or a gambler wondering whether that really will be his last tenner, or a member of the faithful standing in St. Peter's Square waiting for the white smoke - habemus golam!
There comes a point, after you've done this so many times, when you realise that you finally crossed that threshold, like when Tommy starts taking herion in Trainspotting. You went from being a nice, reasonable, upright citizen of a sports fan to someone who would rather watch an inactive screen for almost two hours than, I don't know, read a book or save the whales or do some proper drugs. Me? I can't even remember the first time. They all bleed into one prolonged anxiety attack in my mind. For this, I feel both deeply ashamed and perversely proud. I don't know whether to flagellate myself or stare defiantly into the distance.
Credit: louisemarston (Flickr)
I rarely engage in this activity anymore now that it's so much easier to see whatever event you want to, and teletext's function as a first-stop news provider is largely obsolete (though there are still some, i.e. me, who can't shake it from their daily routine). Teletext itself will soon be actually obsolete, disappearing once the final analogue television signals are switched off. Indeed, ITV, Britain's largest commercial TV network, closed down their teletext last month, citing chronic lack of profitability. The BBC's digital stations have a text service which carries much of the same content as Ceefax; but no-one ever got romantic about CDs, did they?
If you're reading this decades hence, possibly after following a link from an article in praise of the primitive technology they used to call "Web 2.0," teletext may make as much sense to you as a toast rack welded onto the side of an SUV. Well, I was there. I watched the West Ham-Arsenal 1998 FA Cup quarterfinal replay on it (including the penalty shootout). And it was great. I think.
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