Once upon a time, before Frank Bough, Selina Scott and Roland Rat, getting ready for school in the morning was accompanied by one of two things. Listening to Good Morning Scotland[1] with Neville Garden and Malcolm Wilson; or turning on the telly and pretending you were posh enough to have teletext, by pointing an imaginary remote control at the TV while the BBC ran its rolling Ceefax InVision slot before daytime programming began. (Okay, maybe that was just me.)
Anyway, this week, the world’s first teletext service, Ceefax, is thirty years old and still going strong (unless you’ve got satellite telly). Originally just an experiment in subtitling, there was a time when half the UK’s population booked their holidays from ads on Ceefax, and there are probably few BBC licence payers who don’t know what’s on pages 302 or 606. And it’s not a bad way to get the latest headlines without the waffle, either– circumlocution isn’t a luxury granted to journalists who have to distill a story into 100 words or so. Online help writers take note 🙂
[1] Coincidentally, in 1980 BBC Scotland broadcast live pictures from the Good Morning Scotland studio while it was on air– the first breakfast TV ever shown in the UK, predating BBC Breakfast Time by three years.