Teletext is dead!

Bloody internet: it’s wholly responsible for ruining everything that’s fun. It’s killed magazines, you never see little pieces of ripped up pornography in bushes nowadays, and Our Price had to close down because people would, for some reason, rather pay nothing for as many songs of music as they want rather than £13.99 for twelve.

And now the internet has killed Teletext, too.

I’ve always regarded Teletext as just one of those things – all rubbish – that are constant in life. You know, death, taxes, people who can’t walk fast enough in busy train stations that you’re not allowed to clobber because there are rules against that kind of thing, apparently. It’s up there with those.

You could always rely on Teletext to be there for you. Well, it was a bit like a crap mate who you always thought would be there for you but the minute you get in a scrap starts shouting the words in his insults in the wrong order and punching backwards.

But it was sort of there, and it had bags of scrambled, rambling charm. Remember getting home from school and having nothing else to do but hammer the red and green buttons playing a bit of Bamboozle? Or scrolling through all 8,237 pages of cheap breaks to Gran Canaria and missing the only good one because the Teletext Gods decided, in their wisdom, to skip that page for you?

Everything’s too slick, too professional these days. Teletext was one of the last lingering pieces of useless, pixelated, primary-coloured nonsense that somehow managed to continue to exist among all the science and flash of Blu-ray, web 2.0 and Second Life.

Now it’s gone, and I’ll miss it dearly.

Tags: Bamboozle, Blu-ray, Gran Canaria, Our Price, pornography, Second Life, Teletext, web 2.0