The Teletext Archaeologist

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Teletext is a medium where encoded pages of information are broadcast alongside a television programme, and can be decoded on-screen by the viewer at the touch of a button. Developed in the UK in the early 1970s, the last British teletext service was discontinued in the mid-2010s but teletext is still used in many countries around the world.

Once broadcast, teletext was generally overwritten on the server and the archive status of teletext pages is patchy at best, with (at least in the UK) only a few examples of pages saved by the broadcasters and some pages saved by the public using PC decoder cards.

This website covers efforts to recover teletext pages from television programmes recorded on regular domestic videotape and other methods.

Tape donation and loans

The Teletext Archaeologist archive consists of pages ranging from 1976 until 2018 and is continually expanding.

In particular, we are looking for:

Video tape recorded between 1974 and 1980
BBC1 before 1984
BBC2 until December 1989
ITV before 1984
Channel Four and S4C, from any era
Paramount Comedy Channel recordings

…can you help to plug the gaps?

First-generation copies are best – copies do blur the teletext signals recorded on the tapes. But if you don’t want to part with original tapes then a good quality dub can still be useful as long as it hasn’t been through a time-base corrector – these can overwrite the teletext data with their own signals. Please do get in touch via the contact section below!

Bluesky Latest

The latest curated finds are shared primarily on Bluesky – here are the latest posts:

@ttxarchaeologist.bsky.social

Jason Robertson (@jaseinblack.bsky.social) presents a curated selection of teletext pages recovered from videotape. Also on Mastodon at @grim_fandango@mas.to and Facebook www.facebook.com/teletextarchaeologist

1,856 posts 655 followers 77 following

Russty Russ @russtyruss.bsky.social 10h ago

Fancy seeing what was in the top 10 charts as seen on Ceefax from w/c 27 August 1989 in which Jive Bunny wanted to Swing The Mood at 1, Black Box wanted to Ride on Time at 2 and Big Fun wanted to Blame It On The Boogie at 6.

(Source : @ttxarchaeologist.bsky.social)