I’m Living in a Box: Why a generation was devoted to Ceefax , and how and why its legacy endures

By Tom Simmonds.

A wave of nostalgia led by children of the 70s and 80s emerged last week, as the 40^th birthday of the BBC’s teletext service, Ceefax, was announced, two years after it had closed down for good. The outpouring of warmth for the service was greeted with bemusement by those of a younger generation, who are used to having rather more information to hand than the 80 word pieces that comprised Ceefax pages.

There was, however, a time when teletext was more than a vehicle for flogging cheap package holidays.  In the 1990s, there were almost no sources of up-to-date football news. There were time-limited sports bulletins, premium rate ‘Clubcall’ numbers and dear old Ceefax. That was it. Pressing the text button on the remote control and punching ‘302 (Ceefax’s football index page) in was always the first thing that I, and many other football-obsessed teens, would do upon getting home from school. Doing this also prevented parental queries about whether you’d been phoning sex lines when an astronomical phone bill full of 0898 numbers hit the doormat.

Also, if you supported a smaller club, Ceefax was a Godsend.  In its heyday, stories about your own club would extend to a small mention on the local news or a specialist football programme, if you were lucky. The place we flocked to in the 1990s was page 312 of Ceefax; the BBC’s football news in brief page. On some days, this was a bumper crop of ten or more pages. I would kneel in front of page 312 daily, in mock supplication, praying that Millwall had signed somebody, anybody and not sold Alex Rae for a pittance to pay the electric bill. That you had to wait what seemed like forever for the pages to change added to the suspense and an uptick in systolic blood pressure.

If we look at how we consume football information today, the debt to Ceefax and other teletext services is apparent. It also shows that, despite its greater availability, we are still behaving largely as we did when we tapped ‘302’. Sky Sports News’ on-screen rolling text updates and rotating league tables on the sidebars are pure teletext, as are the score updates on the popular live score programmes, Final Score and Soccer Saturday. The innovation being that this information now has a human face and you have a chance of a bit of colour being provided by the same place you’re getting the data from. Gone are the matchdays when you needed to have the radio on as well as the live score pages on Ceefax to be across the scores.

So, where does our love of things like Ceefax and its successors come from? A series of experiments on small animals by BF Skinner, the father of behavioural science, more commonly referred to by the shorthand term ‘CBT’ (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy) give a clue. Skinner developed his ‘Skinner Boxes’ which contained a lever or button which an animal could press to get food, water or another type of stimulus.

When we brought up page 302, when we now flick on The Offside Rule, SSN or sites about our clubs on computers and tablets, we are behaving in a more primitive way that we might like to think. We are performing an action that we think will provide us with the sort of stimulus we desire at that time. It is no coincidence that the vehicles on which we get most of this information are box-shaped, from TVs and PCs to smartphones and tablets. We like to create small worlds with limited parameters for ourselves in which we feel we’re being constantly rewarded. Ceefax was a wide-ranging world of bite-sized information that provided that possibility for people, even those who weren’t interested in football.

What are your memories of Ceefax and Teletext? What did you find out through it?

Read more from Tom Simmonds here!

Follow @TallulahonEarth