About Retrotext

The BBC’s teletext service Ceefax and its commercial equivalent, Oracle, first appeared on TV screens in the 1970s and they became the primary source of information for millions of people from the early 1980s onwards. Some of you may not remember Oracle and be more familiar with its successor as, in 1992, the franchise to provide ITV’s service was awarded to Teletext Limited and Oracle became, confusingly, Teletext, the same name as the medium itself. 

Both services gave viewers free and immediate access to the very latest information in a pre-internet era where the only alternative was to wait for the next television or radio bulletin or buy a newspaper. For those unfamiliar with the technology, the services worked by pressing in three numbers on your TV remote corresponding to the page you wanted to bring onto the screen, as illustrated in the armchair guide above which was originally published in 1987.

As teletext pages were updated almost continuously each day, the content wasn't saved so few examples of them exist, but there are enthusiasts able to retrieve some from the videotape used to record TV programmes in the 1980s and 1990s so that people can now view them. All the original teletext pages shown on this site and in the books I have written were recovered in this way and you may see corruptions to words or images on them caused by the retrieval process. 

A key feature of teletext was that while you were reading a report about Eric Cantona's infamous kung-fu kick at Crystal Palace in 1995 or the drama of the 1999 Champions League Final, you could still hear the programme being broadcast on the channel and could switch back to whatever you had been watching immediately at the push of a button. 

As this century dawned, changes in broadcast technology made it increasingly difficult for viewers to access teletext services quickly and easily and they gradually disappeared. ITV's Teletext, the successor to Oracle, ceased broadcasting in 2009 and BBC's Ceefax in 2012, though in Europe there are still a few active teletext services even in 2026. 

The Retrotext designs on this web site are my tribute to this hugely popular, much-loved and sadly missed information medium. 

John