RIP Teletext: The Internet for Poor People

Teletext, the prototype of the Internet beamed directly into your telly box, is to be killed off. And for something that was just blocky text and low-resolution images, people have an awful lot of fondness for it.

There were subtitles on page 888 for people who couldn’t be bothered to listen, sometimes pre-recorded in a studio, but occasionally broadcasting the live version, with hilarious words-that-sound-a-bit-like-the-one-being-said, so children coming out as ‘chew drum’. It’s a shame nobody commandeered it for use as a primitive director’s commentary over Coronation Street.

And before the days of Sky Sports News, Saturday afternoons could be spent on the sports pages waiting for the screen to roll around to “page 1 of 8″ and to your team’s latest score.

The most love seems to be for daily multiple-choice quiz Bamboozle, presented by Jeff Stelling’s pixellated cousin Bamber Boozler. You’d navigate through 15 questions, to be greeted with snark and sarcasm whether you got them right or not. Brilliantly, to stop you cheating, while most teletext pages were numbered 123, Bamboozle somehow had pages like 14F, so you couldn’t just type the number in. Anti-cheat devices on a teletext quiz! Brilliant!

In recent times though, Teletext became like a digital Woolworths: You were vaguely aware it still existed, held it in good regard, but never actually used it. Just wanted other people to use it, in case we needed it one day. Except we never will, because we can get high speed internet implanted into our eyes through the kettle now.

Maybe if they’d experimented with Adult Teletext things could have worked out. Teletits.