Be Excellent To Each Other

Ironically, the one holiday I booked as a package deal in ten years was our honeymoon, where the problems which arose (Thai Airport blockades) were the one problem that couldn't have been insured, but Kuoni had to deal with it for us. Travel insurance and/or credit cards deals with anything else.

Yeah, kill the queen mother again.

I want a Mode 7 asap!

ceefax hasn't got that many colours, dude.

I know. Every time I reduced the palette it dithered everything. Fucking software.
I should have restricted the colours then resized, but hey ho.

[attempt at Mode 7 Titler]

0 Bananas.

Harsh!

Anti-aliasing on the pixel edges, the wrong colours, no header, too many colours. I did consider awarding a low mark, but the more I thought about it the more furiously angry I got with the sheer lack of attention to detail. In fact I've just had a phonecall to say that Mr Chris has exploded in a fit of pedantry and Dr Gaywood is gibbering in a corner repeating the following over and over again:

"Black, Red, Green, Yellow, Blue, Magenta. Cyan and White."

But photoshop wouldn't let me change the colours

a good point Grim... Jim Davidson would do better than that.

This is still wrong though, as I'm pretty sure you can only have two colours in each 2x3 block of "pixels".

I'd love to, but can't think of a way of doing so that wouldn't hamper my future employment prospects.

And of course you've got to use a character space to change colours. Emulating mode 7 in Photoshop is trickier than you'd think...

I once saw Jim Davidson in Dixons, he's a lot taller than you might imagine.

If I had a good snap-to-grid photo editor (which is to say, if the picture was made smaller for me) I'll happily Teletext-ize it.

Jim Davidson came into the TV shop I used to work in and interrupted me while I was showing someone a shitty TV and surround system, and he made a really poor attempt at some humour. He's a twat.

He is by all accounts although Frank Skinner says he met him and wanted to hate him but ended up spending an enjoyable evening chatting with him. So go figure.

Wuss, you haven't lived until you've accidently unplugged something thousands of people are listening to.

Ah, doing things by accident is one thing; announcing on a public internet forum that you're about to do it is quite another!

Maybe I'd enjoy a candle-lit dinner with him too, but he really pissed me off when I was trying to work, the cunt. Maybe I wouldn't have minded so much if he'd actually been funny.

(I'm in a bad mood today).

Other known people I saw in that shop:

Damon Hill (wouldn't be told that the TV he was asking for didn't exist, dick)
Grant Bovey (Anthea Turner's husband, quite posh bit dim but a pleasant chap.)
The guy that did the 'a car/boat/helicopter/some other shit... is born' programmes on Discovery channel (moody prick)
Norman Wisdom's daughter (very nice, kind of milfy too).

He seemed perfectly likeable on Hell's Kitchen. It was clear the producers wanted him to make Irish jokes so Barry McGwigen (sp) could lamp him, but the two got on well. Then he got kicked off for saying that gay people aren't bad people. Go fig.

The vet? He did "A 4x4 Is Born", and he was a idiot on that.

Back to teletext, I vaguely remember an animated (of sorts) cartoon on Channel 4 text called 'hands up'.

Also, I'm sure that one telly we had could access an alarm page on teletext that could be set to alert you at a certain time, but no one I speak to ever remembers it. Seems like a strange thing to have imagined up though.

I enjoyed the UK top 40 chart listings with sarcastic comments after some entries, not sure what channel.

Also, ITV sport text had some OK letter submissions, and an infrequent 'ask the ref' page where sports trivia questions were answered.

I'll miss teletext, although I don't use it that often. If I do need to use TV text though, I'll switch over to analogue first. Digital text just doesn't feel the same to me, in fact it seems a bit rubbish.

Yes him, I saw bits of that one too. I can't remember his name.. I think it's Mark something *googles* Aha! Mark Evans. He wanted an electric razor, and was pissed off that we didn't sell them. He was an idiot.

I remember this. You keyed the time you wanted in as a page number, and sometimes, it even worked. Sort of.

I remember the Ceefax Advent Calendar. Squint and it could have been a candle, santa, reindeer...

Norman had abit of a reputation though.


Joey Deacon, yesterday.

think teletext here is to stay for at least some time, telekst.nos.nl has been the most popular website in the netherlands since the internet started (except google etc), i now usually read it on my iphone with the special teletekst app..

I've just recalled that during the early/mid 90's on C4 Teletext, there was this 'interactive' adventure game based (loosely?) on Knightmare, where you pressed the colour buttons to decide your next move, and dying treated you to a lovely digitised skull (keeping in theme with the show then). It's quite sad that the only thing I recall about it is the skull screen, and even that is very vague in itself.

Oh, and thanks MetalAngel for reminding me of Nick Angst, something I also regularly read until they took the whole section it was on (Ace?) down. There was another section on Teletext around the same time that I forgot the name of, but which I fondly recall chuckling away merrily at one time when they ran a mock-diary of David Blaine's experience in that perspex box in London (this was a fairly recent event at the time, so obviously a billion years ago). The one stand-out moment went very roughly like this: "I was wondering what to do with the eggs the public were kindly providing me with, when I vaguely heard one or two others shout a suggestion: "Toss 'Em!" How helpful!"


Such a shame that Planet Sound says they won't even be able to continue online. What would stop Earls from doing so?

Didn't have a telly, had a look at Teletext on my Gran's, decided it was shit, the end. Surprised it's still around to be honest.

I fucking loved teletext, me.

Back in 1996 the Sci-Fi channel ran a trial live chat text service called Dominion Chat. You phoned up, typed the message on your phone and it updated the text page. In these pre-internet (for me) days, it was like a glimpse of the future.

Oh man, that's quite splendid serendipity that my 888th post was about teletext.

Dude, you miss 8-bit computers and they've been obsolete for 20 years.

I used to use Teletext to look at the football scores, but I haven't done that in about 16 years due to the internet.

A shame, some of the letters were hilarious, like the girl who shaved her minge into the shape of a heart and dyed it red for Valentine's, and wondered why her boyf was put off. Or the bloke who couldn't find any women who weren't Jodie Foster attractive.

Nick (Fisher) took every opportunity to whore his book, 'Living With A Willy', in his responses.

I think I had a letter published once on the Paramount Comedy channel teletext thing once.

I had one in Digitser. Can't remember what it was though.

"I love computer boy in a deeply sexual manner"

I think Biffo agreed with whatever I said.

Barken! Woof! Gossi!

We had one of these, every so often it would fast forward for a split second while you were trying to watch something forcing you to yank the cable out and hope you didn't need the remote again.
(Also the video had switches on it, which makes it sound ridiculously ancient.)

This is the webpage you've all been waiting for. Yes if you are tired of the clutter of the BBC News pages, I present to you Ceefax on the internet!

http://www.ceefax.tv/

Type in a page number or a subject and you get the page from Ceefax!

Welcome to page one of this thread.

It's the thread where the pages cycle through in a loop.

Subtitles on 888 work, but you have to hit refresh alot.

December the 15th is the Official Teletext Death Day, apparently.

I can't believe I missed this thread before! I'd assumed most of us here were regular Digitiser readers since Mr Biffo seemed to get mentioned quite a lot back on WoS. Until very recently I still did read GameCentral first thing in the morning as a means of getting the ol' brain working first thing after waking up, which probably explains a lot about my intellectual capacity. The only reason I'm not still doing it is that I can't get ITV on Freeview when it rains, which it's been doing a lot recently. The fact I've done nothing to sort this out probably tells you all you need to know about how much I watch telly.

What has shocked me deeply to the core though is that there are evidently two Mr Chris's (what exactly is the plural of 'Mr Chris'?), since there's one who sends letters in to GameCentral. I'd always wondered if the GC Mr Chris and our Mr Chris were one and the same, and it would appear from this thread that they aren't. So there you go, shock revelations and all that.

There isn't one - the very concept is too terrifying.

I used to get letters published on various teletext music and video games sites all the time. I often used different names though.

If there were though, we'd find out if two wrongs make a right.

You can't have two Mr Chris's. If you do, one of them has to be called "Mr Dave".