About Retrotext

As a youngster, I trod the same hallowed turf as Everton legend, Peter Reid. Not at Goodison Park, but the King George V Playing Fields in Huyton, situated a few miles outside Liverpool, where the (mostly) boys from Mosscroft and other nearby council estates would hone their football skills. In the days of only three television channels, BBC1, BBC2 and ITV, and no personal entertainment devices, we would play on that magnificent community green space as often as we could, usually only going home because it had got dark.

In 1980, like many from the city of Liverpool in those days, I moved to London in pursuit of work and was fortunate to gain a position with the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF), which at the time was one of the original Information Providers (IPs) on Prestel, a new electronic information service, in many ways the forerunner of the internet. My job was to input data, mostly for farmers around the country, with subjects such as the code for straw and stubble burning and the dangers of rabies. 

Five years later, I became an IP myself, publishing a magazine service which included interactive games and quizzes, horoscopes (by Russell Grant), reviews of TV programmes and advice on personal problems. We also had a weekly Q&A with Peter Reid, who I would phone at Bellefield, Everton's training ground, with questions which Prestel users had submitted about the Toffees, England or football in general, and I would publish Peter's answers online. 

The link-up with Peter had been arranged through our respective dads - sadly, no longer with us - who were drinking buddies in Mosscroft's popular hostelry, The Quiet Man. The pub is gone now, too. 

As the decade drew to a close, the popularity of Prestel waned, not least because of the emergence of teletext as the primary source of news, sport, weather and virtually everything else for millions of people. During the 1990s, as the number of satellite television channels increased, I was involved in the creation and management of teletext services for MTV, CNBC and National Geographic, as well as, in the Noughties, Setanta, At The Races and Racing UK (RUK). In fact, RUK Text was the last teletext service still available in this country until its own demise in 2016. 

Now retired, I have lived in Ipswich for the last forty years, in the wonderful county of Suffolk. The Retrotext designs on this web site are my tribute to this hugely popular, much-loved and sadly missed information medium. 

John