'Ceeya Ceefax' ran the Sun's headline as this week's official switchover to digital TV spelt the end of the television-based information and news service. Checked weekly at its peak in the Nineties by around a third of the British population, the retro news pages - the world's first app possibly? - updated its last flight details, that day's weather and then disappeared from our screens forever. Well, from most of our screens. It's still available in a few select regions, but as analogue reaches its final days across the UK, so too will Ceefax.
Time for a little nostalgia? Barely. A straw poll round the office offered up the not-too-startling revelation that most of us presumed it had ended years ago. How on earth had it survived this long in the age of Google?
"Anything funny we could do on the end of Bamboozle?" offered up our Executive Editor. Blank faces all around. Not a lack of ideas so much as a total lack of any comprehension about what Bamboozle might be. Everyone went back to their Facebook walls and Twitter feeds.
In a case of perfect old-meets-new irony, it wasn't long before Bamboozle was trending on Twitter proving, if nothing else, not everyone on Twitter is under the age of 30.
So Ceefax is over, but that doesn't mean tomorrow's world isn't embracing a little of yesteryear. Sky Plus, TiVo and the like might be standard fare in households up and down the country, but we're back to watching programmes in real-time simply so we can share the experience with our friends and family. Witness the 12 million tuning in to watch The Voice each Saturday. I've started cancelling Wednesday nights out simply so there's at least some element of surprise when watching The Apprentice. If I'm so much as ten minutes late, Twitter and/or all the live blogs I'm plugged into has given the game away. And it's the same with Homeland, Mad Men and the like. As Grace Dent's swansong column for the Guardian this Saturday hilariously points out, TV's gotten pretty damn good recently and we want to gossip, argue and natter about it with everyone we know, whether they're sitting on the sofa beside us or not.
Future thinkers are listening and working out ways of combining the best of the old and new. Hands up who's heard of Zeebox? The brainchild of the genius mind behind the BBC's iPlayer, the TV companion app is designed to not only let you chat to friends about the shows you're all watching, but buy the box-set, download the soundtrack and order the main character's shoes, too. If it let you check the weather, they could have called it Zeefax.
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Ceefax - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
www.ceefax.tv Your live news search engine. !
BBC News - Ceefax: A love letter
mb21 - ether.net - The Teletext Museum - Ceefax
Ceefax switch-off: Twitter pays tribute | Media | guardian.co.uk
RIP Ceefax: Digital switchover kills off last teletext service
Nation mourns a fitting end as the Ceefax age slips away
Boot up: why handsets don't merge, Ceefax lives!, Ikea's smart TV, Intel's ...
Like RTV and Al Jazeera did? Odd that they are both being broadcast. Yet the band they are on shows no signal. At least, on equipment receiving regular overnight software mods.
"Time for a little nostalgia?"
More apprehension, actually.
"most of us presumed it had ended years ago"
as did democracy and free speech.
"Bamboozle"
A new party political game (distraction), fit for all the family of man.
"Not a lack of ideas so much as a total lack of any comprehension about what"
the benefits of totalitarian rule might be in the wider scheme of things. Optimising the quest for ensuring the continuity of the species, for instance.
"Everyone went back to their Facebook walls and Twitter feeds"
and unenlightened dark age rites?
"it wasn't long before Bamboozle was trending on Twitter proving, if nothing else,"
that humanity only has itself to blame. Should it prove unfit in terms of de rigueur Darwinian survival requirements.
"there's at least some element of surprise when watching The Apprentice."
Its in finding out why anyone with the innate ability to be an entrepreneur, would need assistance to do it? Did Al?
"who's heard of Zeebox?"
Is it a robot Zebra?
"If it let you check the weather, they could have called it"
oracle. As the chances of getting it right by divination are comparable.
Goodby Ceefax, and .... Goodby Euro...
And so, Mr. Farage, who has predicted the implosion of an interesting experiment ... will be dramatically vindicated this coming week of 23 April.
After this week no one of real substance will question his analytic acumen.
It is time.
It is the time that a patterned science that well describes retrospectively, currently, and prospectively the optimal self assembly and operation of the well linked and interdependent global macroeconomic debt-money-system .. the exact time ... for nonlinear bad nonrepayable debt default.
It will start this week in Europe where the current leverage of European banks go beyond the 2008 bubble and the US financial industry's unrepentant and unpunished claim to fame.
Unlike the US Federal Reserve which represents the financial head of a hegemonic superpower with a union of 50 states with over 200 years of collective history and common wars and hardships ... And representing the essential guardian value keeper of so many world wide foreign derived and product exchanged and held dollars and US debt - unlike the US central bank -the troika banks representing the European experiment have no such long history, superpower status, nor world wide appeal and commitment to keep the Euro afloat a world currency.
From what I understand neither the US or Europe has sustainable debt levels.
We need to bow down to our Chinese masters, they run the true economics of this world.
/sarcasm ends/
While I agree in principle with most of what you said, I think the world needs to look beyond capitalism. It's a dead duck.
Anarchism is the future. (Anarchism doesn't mean what most people think, though most don't bother to look it up, they just trust the definition they get from newscorp newspaper/fox/bbc etc.)