Clearing out some of the bulkier files on illarterate.co.uk, I came across a timeline created for my final year Graphic Arts Research Project (GARP) I’d completely forgotten about. It may be text only, but wasn’t teletext? Well, I know it incorporated some primitive artwork, but wasn’t the text the bit you were interested in? No? Forget it.

Anyway, with Teletext all but dead now –I believe a small percentage of the UK still have access to digital signals– I thought it an appropriate time to repost this. The top half relates to teletext-specific landmarks whilst the lower portion outlines related technology in other areas such as video gaming and computing development.

Click here or the pic for supreme quality pdf (70kb, right click > save as to save to disk).

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.

Haha, finally my long-awaited chance to enter Teleglitcher into the E4 sting competition! Specially cut for 2009, this version is a ten second re-edit to fit the new time constraints. And here it is, in all its HD YouTube glory! Warning, may be a bit manic for some tastes.

I don’t hold out much hope of winning – a lot of the other entries are miles better than mine – but you never know. You can read up a bit more on the development of this project in the posts listed below.

• Teleglitcher forerunner vid @ Pixel is Power
• E4 Telegltcher Work in Progress @ Pixel is Power
• E4 stings ‘lost’ outtake @ General Illarteracy
• Some still screens