Pixel Addict #23, September 2024
Teletext 50
Paul Rose – Teletext legend
You can't have a celebration of teletext without Paul "Mr Biffo" Rose.
What are your earliest teletext memories/experiences?
Probably Pages From Ceefax, which used to run on the BBC channels in the days before 24hr TV. Weirdly, I only think I started using it in my teens, and pretty much exclusively ORACLE, as Ceefax always seemed quite dry. ORACLE was much more creative, with soap operas and cartoons. I was genuinely a fan. No word of a lie, I used to think how cool it would be to write for.
Digitiser was one of the most popular sections on Teletext. What made it so special in your eyes?
I know why it was special to me – the first job where I really felt I could be creative, I was learning to write, I got to play games every day – but can't really say why it was to others. It was partly popular because it was about video games, and there wasn't an Internet in those days. We were the only daily games mag, at least in the beginning, so people read us even if they didn't like us.
But I think the fact it didn't try to pander to the broadest possible audience, and we were stubbornly weird just to entertain ourselves, meant that those people who liked it REALLY liked it.
And what are you most proud of?
In terms of Digitiser… I don't really know. Having done something that people love, that was important to their lives in some way, is really meaningful. There's still a lot of love for Digi, and I never get tired of hearing how much it meant to people. That's probably the closest I get to feeling pride over it. Also, I guess the fact that we were uncompromising.
In some ways though our audience was there by default, because we had no real direct competition, so I'm more proud of the things I'm doing now and the brilliant community that has built up around it all. Digi on Teletext never really felt like a challenge somehow, and I mostly feel proud when I achieve something that has pushed me out of my comfort zone.
Since 2014 Digitiser has been brought back as a website, live show and YouTube channel. How did your vision for the "brand" expand?
It was just natural really. We're a long way from Teletext now, but I've kept Digitiser as a brand – in fact, I even trademarked it – as it's just a useful umbrella for whatever I want to do. Initially it was a shorthand for people, a way to pique curiosity if they were familiar with the original. I have quite a restless brain, so my vision tends to never quite settle on any one thing. I achieve what I wanted to achieve with something, then I want to move onto the next project that'll challenge me. We've gone from weird sketch shows, to a retro gaming series, to trying to be regular kinds of YouTubers – albeit with insane sorts of variety – to more retro gaming, and now doing these kind of semi-tongue-in-cheek travel and history documentaries. I think this one's going to stick, though. It's the one I've enjoyed the most. But there's never been a vision; just what I want to do at any point in time.
How hard was it to bring classic characters to life and also come up with new ones?
Some were easier than others. Mr T was just a case of hiring a lookalike. Man's Daddy was pretty easy to formulate. It took me years to work out how to do The Man With A Long Chin, until I asked the comedian Paul Putner to do the voice. He nailed it.
At last year's Digitiser show I believe a Mr Steve Merrett appeared in relation to the classic rivalry from the 1990s? A nice throwback to the original days.
Yes! Steve and I get on fine these days. It's weird how many other games industry survivors from the '90s I kind of get to chat to from time to time now – ones that I never even really knew back then. I'm friendly with Dave Perry, Big Boy Barry et al. I foresee a point where we're all living in the same care home.
50 years since the teletext service began! What do you think of the various people and projects keeping the memories and preservation of it alive?
I love it. When I stopped doing Digitiser, I genuinely thought I'd never see it again. It was such a disposable medium, until these geniuses figured out how to retrieve those pages. Some of my old stuff makes me cringe, but that's natural. Plus if it wasn't for Chris Bell and Super Page 58 keeping Digi's memory alive for 25 years or so, I'm not sure I'd still be doing stuff under the Digi name [thanks Paul, I'm very happy to be of service - CB].
You can find Paul's work at digitiser2000 and on YouTube
Chris Bell – Super Page 58
Chris runs the ultimate Digitiser fan site, Super Page 58, which can be found here.
What are your earliest teletext memories / experiences?
Looking through the Argos catalogue and pining for the exotic technology on display, and being at my cousin's watching TV when he casually put teletext on and being blown away are my earliest memories. The early morning pages from Ceefax that were shown before breakfast TV probably started the fascination. When our ancient TV finally gave up the ghost in 1991 I was able to successfully lobby my parents to get us a new one with teletext - and I probably spent more time reading it than watching TV. Then ORACLE gave way for Teletext Ltd on 1 January 1993, which saw the birth of Digitiser. The first thing I did on New Year's Day was to try to find a gaming magazine on the new service. Little did I know, my world changed in that moment.
Way back in 1997 you started Super Page 58 - the Digitiser archive. What led to the decision to start chronicling Digi?
Super Page 58 started out as a simple uni assignment - you've got two weeks to make a website on anything you like. I thought hard about the subject, as I wanted mine to add something to the internet that didn't already exist. Then I thought, "what do I remember a lot about?", and it came to me - Digitiser. I enjoyed working on it so much that after the assignment was finished, I just kept going. For 27 years!
It's over 20 years since Digi ended but the content keeps coming. What are some of your favourite memories about Super Page 58?
Even now I struggle to make sense of the fact that teletext recovery is possible. And not just possible, but there are heroes churning it out on an industrial scale. No records were kept by the teletext companies themselves, so we accepted that when it was gone, it was gone - seeing it all again now is an absolute gift. I'm constantly surprised by how accurate my memories are of things that were broadcast decades ago. I keep a running tally of what I call grails – the outstanding moments of significance/hilarity that I can remember from Digi's life, that we're slowly but surely finding.
Things like The Man With A Long Chin's assassination and later reincarnation, the stupid fake adverts and intentionally terrible celebrity 'pin-ups', numerous characters with varying degrees of phallic appearance, the Christmas pant-ohs, phone pranks and April Fool editions have all been a joy to see again. But number one on the list has to be the infamous review of Sonic 3, where they raised hell by daring to give it a rating of 72%. Which I fully endorse, but many others… did not.
Have the likes of Paul "Mr. Biffo" Rose, Violet Berlin and other games journalists helped recover pages or added other content for you?
They haven't provided any recovered pages, but Biffo has been invaluable providing all the inside info, which helped me enormously in writing the voluminous Digi encyclopaedia on the site. Way back in the 90s, Adam 'Mr Cheese' Keeble sent me a copy of the Nintendo magazine Super Control that featured a double page spread of that mag's editorial team going up against the Digi fellas in a series of bizarre challenges. Years later, that sent me on a quest to track down all the copies of Super Control (and its stablemate Mega Drive Advanced Gaming) that featured Digi comic strips of The Man With A Long Chin.
Favourite thing about Digitiser?
It created its own world. It was like a secret club that only a few people understood – but those few people turned out to be 1.5 million readers per week! Still, though, it felt exclusive and conspiratorial, which was encouraged by the in-jokes, years of lore, hundreds of characters, and the bizarre use of language and catchphrases. It was quintessentially British and deeply eccentric, sharing a sense of humour with the likes of Reeves & Mortimer and Monty Python, but also being so firmly rooted in the kind of comics and magazines you'd get as a kid in the 70s and 80s. It was very much part of that lineage with its jokes and themes.
The 'speaking truth to power' aspect appealed as I got older, the fact that they'd happily make fun of people in the games industry who could easily stop their access, and biting the hand that feeds within Teletext itself. They just didn't care. The innuendo, the jokes that were hidden and not-so-hidden, the non-sequitur reveal-oh-jokes, the way it used to wind-up dullards to such an extent that you just had to laugh at them. It was truly an institution.
Have you seen Paul Rose's Digi Live projects? Is it strange seeing characters you have been covering in a live / YouTube show?
I certainly have, they're the most glorious experiences! Not only was I at the first Digi Live in 2019, where I helped run the free Chunky Fringe event that was put on by David Walford, who's a cornerstone of the teletext community, but I actually had the honour of working with Biffo to create the show for one of the nights of the 2023 edition. That was of course Digi's 30th anniversary year, and we'd discussed how we could celebrate its history in a suitably-anarchic way. Biffo didn't want it to be just another interview, so I suggested 'The Trial of Mr Biffo' – justice finally being visited on him for his countless teletext transgressions.
Not only did he like the idea, but he told me he wanted me to produce it – I actually had to fill an hour of the live show! I managed to get various legendary figures from Digi's past to record witness videos accusing him of crimes – including Mean Machines Sega editor Steve Merrett, who revisited the feud between the two magazines with good grace and humour, while Biffo looked on from the dock in stripey prisoner overalls. Biffo insisted he didn't want to know about any of what was happening, so thanks to a surreal, grotesque accusation made by his Digi colleague Tim 'Mr Hairs' Moore in his video, Biffo ended up wearing a gigantic purple, hairy sphincter around his neck that got tossed into the crowd for someone as a souvenir. You can't get much more Digi than that!
Oh, and I got to write scripts for classic characters like The Snakes and The Man With A Long Chin and have them voiced by actual proper comedy actors that have been on TV! That was a big moment – getting Paul 'Curious Orange' Putner to play The Man and list all the many and varied ways he'd been abused by his creator over the years will remain a highlight of my entire life.
50 years since the teletext service began! What do you think of the various people and projects keeping the memories and preservation of it alive?
The teletext online community is positively choc-full of superheroes. There are people who love the technology and go diving through skips to find old teletext kit being thrown away, people who love the Ceefax in-vision music, and those like me who are in it to archive these moments of cultural significance that were seemingly fleeting and ephemeral, but can now be seen again and preserved forever.
And in amongst those, you have devotees of various teletext sections – I'm dedicated to Digi, but there are other sites for the teens mag Mega-Zine, the Biffo-created comic strip Turner The Worm, and more besides. One of the nicest things is just how, well – nice – they all are. And selfless. If we all have one thing in common, it's a sense of duty in unearthing this stuff to be enjoyed again.
Do you know of any important moments from the annals of Digi history that have been omitted? If so, then mail me (superpage58@gmail.com) right now, man. Credit will be duly given for anything that gets put up.
