Videos related to teletext pages which have been recovered from the data recorded on ordinary domestic video tape. Also some advanced teletext experiments and black projects...
The big graphic on the front page greeting viewers at 13:07 was created by Paul Rose (aka Mr. Biffo). He was a graphic artist at Teletext, who let him and his mate Tim Moore (aka Mr. Hairs) do a gaming magazine on Teletext. The magazine was called _Digitiser,_ and the rest is history. 13:46 ...and there it is! Not long until the likes of The Man's Daddy, Mr. T and his bins, Fat Sow, Chart Cat, Insincere Dave and all the other characters would be introduced.
I can’t believe this was more than 30 years ago. Oracle was great, much better and more varied than Ceefax, and really popular. The replacement Teletext was bland and boring. Sadly, Oracle was run by a small company and when their contract was up, the great god Tendering came into play. Oracle didn’t have a hope in hell in outbidding a consortium with the likes of the Daily Mail on board. As usual money outranked a quality product.
I thought oracle was far and away a mutch better service than teletext all teletext had was bamboozle oracle gave mutch much more and felt like oracle cared more than teletext
Teletext was very badly broken, when it launched in Central East. It was almost unusable. And the problems did not significantly improve for weeks. From my memory, there were still some lingering issues several months in. Sizable sections of pages were garbled, some only showed up as half a page, others were not on the listed page number. It wasn't a problem with the TV, because the glitches would replicate exactly the same every time you visited a particular page. I struggle to imagine what was causing it to be so broken. This London footage seems relatively fine, but there was that page number issue of content not being where it should have. It's really fascinating to see this. I've seen screencaps of the end of Oracle before, but to see it in its true actual broadcast is a time-capsule. A very important moment to archive, it seemed as though it was lost forever. To have the full service accessible is really special.
I also enjoyed play Bamboozle on Teleyext on 4 it didn't play it during the week or on a Sunday it was more a Saturday and it was easier as it was a junior version some versions were diffrent one that was used at weekends was to guess famous pepole the faces were digital so you sometimes you could't tell who it was
Thank you for this of course. An interesting look so too at the one time that Oracle on ITV-though it was also on Channel 4 and S4C too-in 1992 changed to Teletext in 1993 so then too. A result of the then ITC giving the franchise to someone else then as they had already done so with the other ITV companies at the time who altered. Well done!
When they were doing the switchover from Oracle to Teletext, the test page we see, with "Teletext Transmission", am I right in thinking, that would've previously said Oracle there?
Great video. On that New Years Eve. I seem to remember coming home at 1.30 A.M. Here in the South of England. The new I.T.V. Franchise for the South Meridian. Had three seperate news studios. Southampton Maidstone and Reading. So from the start I.T.V. Meridian had a news service on Teletext from 1st January 1993. HAPPY DAYS.
The old Oracle regional sections, were separate to the national sections, as you say. But, Teletext did keep regional listings for TV, in the new service. However, these were provided by Teletext, not the ITV companies, who had their own service, as you say. The other regional sections from Oracle, such as News, Sport, Weather, classifieds, were actually intergrated into the main sections. There was a regional index, so later on, News was on 300 on ITV. But, regional news was on 330 onwards, and I remember that, in Central Scotland, the regional news was even regionalised further, to East and west! Same with sport.
Part of the engineering work going on in those few minutes was because Oracle and Teletext had different ways of distribution. Oracle was put on at the ITV companies, Teletext was inserted into the vision at transmitter sites. There was a page on Teletext that showed the page queues to each of the 25 Teletext insertion sites. The subtitles and 600 pages continued to come from the ITV companies on the vision. This did mean that they could, in theory, have 25 totally different Teletext services in different pats of the country, they weren't restricted to ITV region
I remember this happening live; I was watching Channel 4. It was a little smoother there - Oracle did the closing up animation over the final 5 minutes before midnight, then on the first bong of Big Ben the Teletext index appeared.
This was more upsetting than I thought it would be. As much as I loved Teletext Ltd and its fun and games, it was sad to see these fine custodians lose their seat. :-(
