Ooh yeah

Currently in development: the story of an ex-cop returning for one last drug bust… on the gang that framed him, forcing him to flee. Northern stereotypes ahoy in the forthcoming YouTube mini-epic Metal Gear Salford.

Development: 30%

I’ve been doing a little bit of guest blogging for Wigan Athletic media site [Thas] Not a Patch On Harry Lyon, which recently unveiled its new user blogs.

It coincides with the launch of my new football blog, Jesus Was a Wiganer, which you may remember I mentioned a week or two ago on this very blog.

Not sure if there’ll be much difference between the types of posts featured on each blog, but I plan to share them out somewhat, with the longer, more detailed stuff mostly reserved for the NAPO blog.

Expect my activity on those blogs to fluctuate through the course of the season as and when I find stuff to write about or feel the urge to blog and, of course, when I have the time.

Incidentally, that picture is one of mine. There is a possibility you may recognise it as it has been syndicated around the internet:

• Exhibit A
• Exhibit B

It’s on my Flickr account in its highest quality, so feel free to use it for your own devices – a plug might be nice, though .

I attempted to record Sunday’s episode of Top Gear, on VHS of course. My efforts were briefly thwarted, however, by the fact my set top box seems to crash and reload on the hour, without fail. Usually, though, it’s a simple matter of the box resetting itself, and it’s been a while since something as mint as this happened.

Actually quite glad I got this on tape. I may start purposely trying to record this stuff more often, perhaps over the course of a few months, and edit together some sort of mega glitch video. That would be awesome.

A view of the Robin Park sports stadium (left) and the DW Stadium (right). Went for Wigan season tickets on the 2nd July (date on which this photo was taken) but decided to wait until the general sale date to get a better seat.

Full size image available to view on the Illarterate Flickr photostream.

The date was set – Teletext, the digital medium often seen as the spiritual successor to the Internet, would be switched off along with the analogue signal in 2012.

But now that date has been brought forward two years thanks to poor financial performance, possibly caused by the rise of the Internet.

In the next few years, analogue television will be phased out as one by one, the old transmitters are switched off. A campaign to ensure people are aware of this has been in force for a good while now, and OAPs have been able to claim a Freeview set top box free of charge. Unfair, I want my MTV! Well, maybe not as MTV has never been on free-to-air television.

Worse still, we now have to put up with this ‘interactive television’ thing. Now, I will concede that it does have its plus points and has improved markedly since its early days, but it has some major flaws.

The most annoying of these is the fact you can no longer go directly to a specific Teletext page. For example, if I wanted to see how the England cricket team were doing, I would punch up page 341 on Ceefax, but if I do the same on BBCi, I get the ‘page not found’ message. The page does exist, but I have to go through an extra menu to find it, wasting precious battery juice and increasing the risk of RSI. Please fix this now, BBC.

Technical issues aside, I miss the old pixellated aesthetic. Everything on interactive is clean cut and of photo quality, sometimes to the detriment of loading times.

But I miss the old teletext weather maps of Britain, Bamber Boozler’s blocky face and the cruddy flashing advertisements. Yes, I never thought I would miss those, but I do.

Maybe it’s a bit like losing a beloved pet that you’ve grown up with, through good times and bad. You think it’ll always be there, but sadly it does have to end. Teletext has far outlived arcade video games, numerous game consoles and other associated electronic media of its time to still be with us today… just about.

It’s a British institution that many will be sad to see the back of. Will interactive TV fill the void? Probably never.