On page 101 you will find an overview of the latest news. Regional news from page 160, weather from page 400, football from 302. The UK version of Teletext that the Northern Irish Nathan Dane has copied is not yet complete, but by far the most important pages can be found there.
In the United Kingdom, text television service Ceefax, as Teletext was called here, was abolished when the national broadcaster BBC switched to a digital network in 2012. to sorrow of millions of Britons. But they can now use the service again thanks to Nathan Dane (20) from Northern Ireland. About five or six years ago, as a teenager, he got the idea to copy Ceefax – “I like everything that has to do with old-fashioned television,” he says over the phone.
For years Dane’s work went under the radar and had five, six, sometimes maybe ten users a day. Until last week The Guardian devoted attention to his project in an article. His website could no longer handle the traffic, suddenly it had between ten and fifteen thousand visitors. Dane temporarily shut down the site to take down videos to make it easier to load everything. “It was wild.”
A few former Ceefax editors have also reached out to him. “They compliment me on how it looks and come up with stories about the past. And I get emails from people who love it and ask if they can install this again for their parents on their TV.” That is possible, with a specific device (de raspberry pi, a small computer) and a television that supports teletext. Dane has put a short explanation for it on his website. He himself has Ceefax “always on” on the television in his room.
Good old times
In today’s fast-paced online news world, Ceefax provides the latest news in a simple, calm environment, says Dane. No videos and photos, no advertising, just text, straight forward. That’s why he gets so many positive reactions, he thinks, because it reminds people of ‘the old days, the good old days’. “Even loading the pages takes a while. We are not used to that anymore.”
The BBC came in 1974 first with teletext, a service they sent on unused bandwidth on the television signal and called the service Ceefax; a pun on see facts. Weekly, the popular service had about 22 million users. Many countries followed with similar services, and hooked since the rise of the internet off again. The BBC kept another similar service on the air, BBC Red button, but also stopped doing that in 2020.
Now the Dutch Teletext of the NOS is still one of the handful of active teletext services worldwide. But where the NOS has a special editor for Teletext, Nathan Dane quickly realized that making news items himself would take too much time. So he designed, according to him this was the most difficult, a program that automatically loads the data from the BBC website as text. Videos skip that system and when they change their format at the BBC, Dane has to adjust his settings too.
As professional as Nathan Dane’s Ceefax looks, he even has pages of historical facts, it’s just a hobby for him. According to him, copyrights are also not a problem because he does not earn any money with them. Dane works at a digital advertising company. And he didn’t design everything himself, but also uses what other Ceefax fans made before, for example the interactive tool to enter page numbers. He is still expanding and sometimes gets requests for certain sections as well. “Soon I will see if I can add equestrian sports and the results of the lotteries.”
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