Goodbye to the instant analogue gratification of Ceefax

by Dan Mobbs

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Its brutalist style was seemingly born from a Crayola colour palette, it was prone to making you wait for the start of an article, and Bruce Rioch found out he had been sacked as QPR assistant manager in 1997 when he read it on the service. It can only be Ceefax.

Ceefax was the pinnacle of information on demand in an analogue world when finding out the football results meant waiting for the news or pink Sports Argus to hit the press sometime on Saturday evening, but Ceefax was finally shutdown in January after 44 years of service.

It will likely be held in a slightly rose tinted esteem by football fans from the 1980s and 90s, but the unparalleled access to information it offered and its impact on football culture at the time shouldn’t be underestimated, just ask Dennis Bergkamp when he signed for Arsenal in 1995.

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“After the press conference we get back to the hotel. The deal’s done, and we’re in our room relaxing,” he said in his 2013 book, Stillness and Speed.

“As normal, I look up the sports headlines on teletext. We get the BBC in Holland so I know about Ceefax. I call up page 301 and I’m shocked. The first two lines are in huge letters: “BERGKAMP JOINS ARSENAL.” For the first time it hits me: “Woah! What’s going on here?” I’m in this big country. I’m in London.”

It was a different time of shellsuits, warehouse raves, Kickers, Les Dennis, Rodney falling through the bar, Perry Groves, Jet from Gladiators, Bruce’s Price Is Right, and Ceefax. Another time that meant that if you wanted to check the league table you were at the mercy of a scrolling page 324.

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But, after arriving home from dinner at the new Fatty Arbuckle’s in your dad’s new all-electric Ford Orion, the joy of excitedly waiting for the page to turn so you could see your team’s result was a joy only known to those of a certain age.

It might sound laborious now in an age of online instant gratification, but at the time Ceefax meant you didn’t have to sit through the British badminton semi-finals from Sheffield on Grandstand to wait for word of the day’s results, and instead could browse the Serie A league table at your leisure.

And it wasn’t merely a young statistician’s aid, as it proved to be a surprisingly useful service that could even get you a professional game in a televised FA Cup match. Roy Essandoh was one the most famous benefactors when he became an FA Cup hero thanks to Ceefax in 2001. He read a plea from injury-hit Wycombe for players and ended up getting the winner in a quarter-final against Leicester that year.

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Staring at its limited format, challenging colour combinations and oversize font, it doesn’t appear to be the most welcoming source of information, particularly as the word count was restricted to a few short paragraphs per page.

Far from hindering it though, this simplicity instead had a positive impact as it ensured the articles carried a condensed precision, which was recognised by The Plain English Campaign, who gave Ceefax a lifetime achievement award for “clarity” and use of “everyday words”.

Even its name was blindingly simple, as it was called Ceefax, simply because viewers would be able to quickly “see the facts” of any story of the day.

Browsing through the sport pages in between playing Bamboozle was an idle pleasure for many, and its audience peaked in the 1990s when it had 20 million viewers who checked the service at least once a week.

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Harriet Harman, Labour’s former deputy leader and shadow culture secretary, said at the time of its closure: “Ceefax is a great national institution, and it’s sad to bid goodbye to a service which gave so many access to news, sport, TV listings and much else besides.

“But with the end of one era comes the start of another as the digital switchover is completed - people can access more channels, and interactive services which are the successors of Ceefax.”

So, as the final Ceefax service is switched off and it passes over to its analogue resting place, what better way to finish with some sleazy late night sax and scrolling news to wake you from the sofa after one too many Blue Nun cocktails.

Image: Flickr / Sean MacEntee

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