Cee you later Ceefax
Posted by Sally Kay on October 25, 2012
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Ceefax switched off on Tuesday night which made me feel a little sad and nostalgic – perhaps because I grew in the 90’s with my Dad watching Ceefax for several hours every Saturday afternoon waiting for the Bolton Wanderers football scores to flash up… It seems that many of us have nostalgic memories of Ceefax – my boyfriend remembers screaming at Ceefax for several hours watching the 1995 Kent vs. Essex cricket league match score refresh every 30 seconds… my nan and granddad used it for weather updates… and below several members of The Value Engineers share their most favourite memories…
‘Ceefax has always been about Saturday afternoon watching the football scores drop in. Throughout the 80s that’s all me and my friends did.’ – Richie Heron
My abiding memory of Ceefax is looking for holidays with my parents, and then waiting with baited breath for my dad to get off the phone to see where we were off to! (Usually a caravan in Wales…). We also used Ceefax for TV listings, a market which has changed significantly over time – with socially-integrated, personalised online listings, all other forms of listing are suffering. The likes of Radio Times in print are now positioning themselves as listings-plus, with exclusive interviews, behind-the-scenes and expert reviews.
And the craziest thing is that I sat for hours playing the quiz game Bamboozle – the pages took ages to load and if you got a question wrong you had to go back to the beginning. I guess as the world has sped up we have less time for these things…phone apps that do a lot of what Ceefax did allow us to check listings, look at sports scores etc. on the go – we can, and expect to be able to, multitask a lot more…. – Emma Barker
‘My memory is in the 80′s watching my uncle using Ceefax to scroll through lists of cheap last minute holidays…..then calling up to always find they had sold out…an early model for Last Minute .com perhaps!’ – Ken Wright
I’m sad about Ceefax going! I used to use it as a TV guide but it took forever waiting for the numbers to tick round and then you had to wait ages for it to get to the time of day you wanted to look at then start all over again with another channel. I can actually remember having a TV (we only had one at home) which didn’t have teletext at all. My friends at school used to play a quiz game on there, using the 4 coloured buttons and I thought I was massively missing out! – Rebecca Cook
‘Used to love watching the football scores update at my granddads place.’ – Will Butterworth
Cee you later Ceefax, we will cherish the memories!
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