SR is publishing a selection of portraits by Joyce Gunn Cairns

Today: Aly Bain

 

I'm sorry to say goodbye

to Ceefax, for I almost

came to love it

R D Kernohan

 

The powers that be have just switched off my analogue TV. But not all change is progress.
     I shan't really miss the unconverted set in the bedroom, though my wife occasionally sought asylum there from Sky Sports. Even though the main set is set firmly for cable I dare say I can retune the digital channels if I have to. What I shall miss is the poor relation in the BBC news family, the Ceefax text service. You lose it when your analogue goes. Although it's due to limp on in parts of the country till the digital switchover is completed next year, its life (which dates back to 1974) is drawing peacefully to a close. 
     The BBC assures us that Ceefax is not really being lost but marvellously improved.  It tells us to use something called Red Button which includes the 'best of Ceefax'. This does nothing of the sort, for it lacks the combination of instancy and succinctness which the old TV text service usually provided. If I try the red-button route I hang around while I get messages telling me to wait or that what I want is loading. If I stay with the old text button on the digital system things are better but it take me three times as long to reach and absorb the main news stories (and even longer to find the rugby news) as it did with Ceefax. And, unless it is my fault for not finding yet another button, I am forced to share the text news with a TV picture on the other side of the screen.
     Ceefax wasn't always wonderful and sometimes it was sloppy – not just in eccentricities of spelling and grammar but on facts. A few weeks ago it told me that the Queen had 'attended Easter Mass' and had me tapping the computer keys furiously to be reassured that nothing untoward had happened at St George's Windsor or Sandringham.
     Sometimes it showed too clearly how its understaffed compilers were struggling to cope with a heavy world news flow. Sometimes (especially on the Scottish section) I could almost detect the yawn as somebody struggled to fill the pages with news of forthcoming concerts in Stornoway or pythons gone astray in Fife. And on English bank holidays nobody seemed to look very hard for news or worried much about updating what there was. 
     But Ceefax did its job, kept me up to date, and in its latter days still pointed the way to what I might want to explore on the web news services. Even when there was dramatic live news on TV, Ceefax could sometimes sum up more clearly. On 9/11 someone woke me from a deep sleep with a telephone call – I had flown home from Chicago the previous day – and said, in passing, that there was something awful happening on TV. I switched on the terrible pictures and running commentary but turned in a few moments to Ceefax to get a summary on what had happened.
     I’m sorry to say goodbye to Ceefax, for I almost came to love it. And my wife came to hate it when I filled commercial breaks and BBC trailer-time by quickly switching over just to check if anything new was turning up. It was always the best of the text services as well the pioneering one. Before CNN decided to refer everyone to the web its text service was painfully sparse and slow. STV's version gave up on news so long ago that I have forgotten what it was like, except that it was poorer than Ceefax. Channel 4's will only take me to the races. 
     I once had German and French versions via cable but can now get Deutsche Welle only on the web. After the Ceefax switch-off the French-language TV5 will offer the only plain news text-service on my TV, but though it's instant it isn't straightforward, for it's run by the Swiss. TV5 emerges from a curious francophone concordat which is loaded with French culture, carries bizarre soap-operas from Quebec, and squeezes in some Belgian coverage which makes BBC Scotland seem almost a model of cosmopolitan sophistication in comparison. But the efficient text service gives a very Swiss-centred view of the world. Its sports section ignores even French rugby, never mind cricket, and its economic and financial ones deal in hard Swiss francs.
     Of course I can now by the use of a little time and many keys and buttons get incomparably fuller text services of various sorts than the BBC even dreamed of when it invented Ceefax to let us 'see facts' quickly.  But the media, like so much else in the modern world, not only assume too rashly that all change is progress but that a wider range of services of increasing technical complexity is an improvement. It's not an improvement unless the old simplicity is also available. Maybe that applies to a lot more in our lives than Ceefax.

 

R D Kernohan is a writer and broadcaster and a former editor of the Church of Scotland's magazine Life and Work