Celebrating Ceefax, which launched on this day in 1974

Virgin Radio

23 Sep 2022, 10:16

For people of a certain vintage, Ceefax will likely have played a part in their lives, and indeed hold a fond place in their hearts. The interactive information service first arrived on television screens all the way back on 23rd September, 1974.

When Ceefax landed on the BBC, it was the first teletext facility in the world, having been developed by BBC engineers. Upon its launch, TV users were able access all manner of info - in the form of blocky text on a blank screen - by pressing a combination of three numbers on their remote controls. 

Whilst many older tellies couldn’t access Ceefax when it first launched, it soon became mega popular as people replaced their goggleboxes with new ones. 

Across 600 pages, Ceefax offered news, weather, music reviews, travel updates, and even games and quizzes. And, of course, the service was massively popular with sports fans. 

Before the internet revolutionised how sport is consumed, Ceefax was the king of immediate sports information. Brilliantly described by The Guardian’s Barney Ronay as “the horse-drawn internet”, Ceefax was one of the best ways that football fans could find out scores and news. There was no Soccer Saturday or rolling sports news in those days, remember. 

Nowadays you can check team news and find out scores from around the world on your phone during a game. Post-match, you can watch highlights, see instantly updated league tables, and even send a tweet to your favourite/least favourite player telling them how brilliant/terrible they are. Back in the day, however, you only had the radio and the blocky text of Ceefax on your TV to keep you up to date.

For football fans in the 1980s and 90s, staring at Ceefax for score updates was a Saturday afternoon ritual. Sure, pages sometimes seemed to take a lifetime to load, and on the occasions when your TV signal wasn’t perfect, information would appear as a frustrating jumble of letters and symbols. But for the most part it offered real-time (or a couple of minutes behind real-time) scores. And that was a massively useful tool to fans when following their favourite team. 

Because text could be displayed either on a black background or superimposed over the programme that was on telly at the time, it became possible for broadcasters to transmit subtitles which could be turned on or off by the viewer. 

And if you were up past your bedtime, you’ll have seen pages from Ceefax being used to fill airtime during late-night breaks in programming. 

At its peak, Ceefax had a whopping 22 million weekly users, but all good things must come to an end, and the analogue switch-off in the UK saw Ceefax turned off for the last time on 23rd October 2012. By then, it had provided information for 38 years. Its replacement, BBC Red Button, is still available on most digital services. 

Although Ceefax may be gone, it will certainly never be forgotten by people who had tellies in the 80s and 90s!