Dedicated, Inseparable, Invincible (Except When Confronted With Carnivorous Plants): Part 4

When we last left The Fierce Flowers, Princess was still trapped inside a now-miniaturised Fierce Flower, and G-Force were wrestling with the moral complications of weighing up the need to set the malevolent plant life ablaze on a scale that would cause Bob Flowerdew to sink to his knees shouting "NOOOOOoooooooooooo" against the possibility that they might still be able to locate and rescue their teammate. Which it has to be said is something of a better recap than 7-Zark-7 manages at the start of the second episode. After consulting a computer, wittering about how the newly released spores "wait only for rain to bring them sporouting into menacing life" and informing all and sundry that he will be maintaining a Red Alert until further notice, he whizzes down a transporter tube thing into his usual command centre, indicating that - despite his solemn promise at the end of the previous episode - he did indeed leave his post before Princess was rescued.

As if to underline the fact that Princess hasn't been rescued yet, we see the rest of G-Force moping around at that sandwich place that she had been looking after in the previous episode. Jason and Tiny snark at each other over who's the most responsibe for the situation, Mark volunteers that "I never thought I could get so angry at a bunch of flowers", and Keyop indulges in an extended bout of a-a-aaaaaaaaaing, resulting in him shedding a lone splashing tear that shows Princess disco dancing in its reflection. "Mark's taking it harder than all of us", observes Tiny, "he and Princess, they had good vibes". Whether they were related to disco dancing is left to the viewer to decide.

Over at the laboratory, Chief Anderson has deduced that water acts as a catalyst for the plant growth - you don't say - and that they need to find a chemical that will permanently prevent this. He then goes off on some odd contextless free jazz improvisation about them thriving in the vicinity of volcanos and proliferating in swampland and even growing in the hottest deserts, all of which has about as much relevance to anything seen in either episode as a plot strand from Lost, and gives the impression that a significant amount has been cut from this episode too. Something that is only strengthened when G-Force react angrily to seemingly nothing, and slope off leaving Chief Anderson to mull over his findings while a flower in a tank rages behind him.

It's not the only one raging, either, as in an alarming sequence of quick cuts we see a small army of flowers parading through the sewers, smashing through concrete and so forth. "Luckily we had advance warning and had evacuated all people from the threatened cities", notes 7-Zark-7 in a handy distraction from the obvious snips made to the footage, though he doesn't see fit to offer any such explanation for the flower that suddenly emits a light beam thing that cracks open the ground; a property that is never referred to again. And as if all of that that wasn't enough, a TV news report implies that the flowers are now intentionally starting fires. Visually dazzling as all this may be, it's also highly bewildering and decidedly off-script, so perhaps it's fortunate that at that precise moment, Mark's communicator picks up a signal from Princess.

Yes, she's still alive inside that flower, and has worked out a way to send a distress call without her horticultural captor noticing. G-Force immediately set off to rescue her, and 7-Zark-7 notes that "she means a lot to me" and reiterates again that he won't leave his post until she's back, but there's a complication; the 'Federation Council' has voted to send in attack units in an attempt to eradicate the flowery menace. 7-Zark-7 bemoans that he warned them that this would only release more spores but that they didn't listen; we can only assume that he didn't actually try very hard at all. G-Force are going to have their work cut out for them, though, as without the aid of an explanatory scene, Zoltar and company have already located Princess and tied her up in a weird electronic bondage thing (perhaps the reason why we didn't get to see an explanatory scene), and are hoping to lead them into a trap.

Chief Anderson, meanwhile, is busy having a snarky one-sided conversation with the flower in the tank when he cuts his hand (on a... handrail?), and the drops of blood that consequently splash onto the bouquet-unfriendly specemin cause it first to throw an almighty tantrum, then to keel over and conk out. From this he deduces that they are unable to withstand exposure to haemoglobin, but the fact that they'd been merrily digesting females left right and centre gives another unpleasant suggestion that we're being redubbedly shielded from some less than enlightened overtones in the original.

Meanwhile, G-Force have tracked the signal to 'the city's old water plant', and after smashing through the wall in The Phoenix, they do some natty business with backflips, electric lasso/tightrope hybrids and - of course - metal bird things, and easily overpower Zoltar and company, who beg for mercy and... Mark lets them go because of 'morals'? There must have been a proper reason in the original. At the same time, Chief Anderson and 7-Zark-7 unleash a spray that they've synthesised from 'an iron molecule in haemoglobin combined with water', which puts paid to the flowers and they fizzle out en masse in an extraordinarily protracted sequence that puts the climax of The Evil Dead to shame.

There's just enough time for a couple of wisecracks and morals from the departing G-Force (no prizes for guessing who said what out of "it'll be a while before I buy flowers again", "they look so pretty and harmless" and "they should never have been taken from their home planet") and it's over to 7-Zark-7 and 1-Rover-1 for some rounding up; "Zoltar will have to come up with something else now, and of course he will, that's why I keep a twenty four hour watch... I don't think my trigatron(??!?) could have stood up to many more hours of pressure like that", and "[bark]" respectively. "I'll be alright as soon as my electrobank gets a quick one-hour recharge", muses the former, though it's clearly going to have to wait as this is indeed one of the episodes where a badly drawn rendition of one or more of G-Force comes to visit him. And on this occasion it's Princess, almost unrecognisable apart from her costume (and even that's a little debatable), who thanks her robotic associate and kisses him, causing the episode to end on a rather worrying 'BOING' sound. Ironically, the producers of Science Ninja Team Gatchaman would probably have cut that out of Battle Of The Planets.

So, that's The Fierce Flowers, and while it's some considerable distance from being a truly representative example of Battle Of The Planets - even aside from all the nearer-the-knuckle-than-usual content, there's no sign either of the Firey Phoenix or of Zoltar's grovel-inducing floating head thing superior 'O Luminous One' - it's not remotely difficult to see why it made such a lasting impression on everyone who saw it the first time around, many of whom probably couldn't even name a single other episode title (not even Attack Of The Space Terrapin). It's an uncomfortable collision of cosy action thrills and spills and dark futuristic-yet-primal terror - almost like a crossover between Castle and Ring - and was certainly far removed from the sort of troubles encountered by the well-spoken flat-capped youngsters that were prone to hanging around God's Wonderful Railway. Some may well now scoff at its chopped and changed sanitised nature, but you do have to ponder on how many people later got into other 'cooler' areas of film and TV and what have you precisely because of Battle Of The Planets, and in any case, there's a very strong sense that in some ways these episodes may actually have been made worse by the re-editing. There are a lot of gaps and leaps in logic that your mind is left to fill in, and the puzzling nature of the narrative jumps can sometimes leave you wondering if they'd left out something that was actually worse than it really was. Erm, if that makes any sense at all.

After the first episode's appearance as part of Buzzfax, according to the Radio Times billing, 'Buzz' was back along with 'Results of Back Page Puzzle'. And you can't really get a stronger underlining of just how different The Fierce Flowers was from anything else on offer than an immediate handover to some semi-animated bits of Ceefax smugly explaining how to decipher some Clive Doig-posed code. After all, it's not like there was some other imported entertainment on offer that morning to compare it favourably against...

Dedicated, Inseparable, Invincible (Except When Confronted With Carnivorous Plants): Part 1

As we've already discussed at some considerable real-Nesmith-hatted length here, the BBC didn't in fact commence their early eighties repeats of The Monkees with the actual first episode, Royal Flush, preferring for no readily obvious reason to open proceedings with the more assured twenty fourth instalment Monkees A La Mode. Instead, Davy's rapier-wielding beachfront entanglement in a plot to overthrow Princess Bettina of Harmonica would have to wait until the repeats were temporarily shunted from their inaugural weekday slot to Saturday Mornings, where it was fortunate - well, we say fortunate - enough to form part of one of the weirdest TV schedules of all time. No, not just one of the weirdest Saturday Morning ones. One of the weirdest ones ever. Full stop.

For reasons best known to themselves and to whatever had apparently leaked into their collective cerebral cortex, on 22nd August 1981, the BBC saw fit to hand over the summer-replacement-for-Swap-Shop Saturday Morning presentational reins to one Buzzfax. And despite the seemingly straightforward embarrassing-attempt-at-being-down-with-the-kids implications of title, this was no ordinary summer replacement for Swap Shop (and let's face it, the majority of them were very ordinary indeed). It involved no clean-cut aspirant Blue Peter presenters gamely attempting to link tedious filmed inserts about 'improving' hobbies and interests with sufficient verve to prevent a mass switchover to ITV. No up-and-coming pop stars were seen struggling through the throwaway b-side of their hit single to mass disinterest in lieu of a proper 'second number'. Instead, Buzzfax saw the whole ninety minutes thrown open to the 'backroom boys', with the full morning's entertainment presented entirely 'by' Ceefax.

Yes, you did read that right. For one week only, The Monkees, Battle Of The Planets, long-forgotten Popeye-affiliated Hanna Barbera canine gigantism third-divisioner Dinky Dog, and the inexplicably revived yawn-inviting Chopsticks-heralded slow-motion black and white comedy escapades of Edgar Kennedy (this week apparently seen facing off against 'The Big Beef') were interspersed with blocky renditions of their primary characters and chirpy quiztacular interjections from 'Buzz', a Ceefax-derived post-Space Invaders Vectrex Gaming System-esque geometrically askew character who may or may not have been voiced by the same bloke as Jig from Jigsaw, and whom in an early excursion into primitive multiplatform interactivity also introduced some puzzles that volleyed back and forth with those set in the back pages of that week's Radio Times. No prizes for guessing, then, that Jigsaw supremeo, Radio Times puzzle-setter extraordinaire, and veteran 'backroom boy' in general Clive Doig was the main creative mover and shaker behind Buzzfax.

In some respects, Buzzfax was an attempt to roll back the post-Posh Paws clock to the lawless frontier days of Saturday Morning TV, when programmes were linked by terrifying splurges of electronic noise and psychedelic graphics courtesy of the over-exclamation marked likes of Zokko!, Outa-Space! and Ed And Zed!, all of which with their dustpan-and-brush-in-a-cupboard-with-cables-in-it ambience did little to counter the prevalent juvenile lack-of-in-vision-continuity-fuelled assumption that 'The BBC' was a big empty building that showed the programmes via some sort of sentient machines that worked of their own volition. But by that point, of course, Noel Edmonds had not only brought 'in vision' continuity right slap bang into the middle of the whole shebang, but had done it with the sort of sense of fun that you weren't really supposed to come across in the square-jawed, improving world of children's television, so no matter how much technological wizardry may have been involved, there was simply no going back and poor old Buzzfax felt the full weight of force; in fact, it's interesting to compare this with the last gasp I Have A Horsey Neigh Neigh flooding of the afternoon Children's BBC schedules with ropey linking BBC Micro-derived 'computer graphics' a couple of years later before Philip Schofield was brought in to perform his own particular riff on the Edmonds format. Well it would be interesting to do that, except that it would be straying a little too far onto the 'serious' side of things for what we're trying to do around here. We're talking about some talking Teletext, for 4-T's sake.

Zokko!'s name might have rung out from the corners back in the day, but we weren't back in the day no more. The week before Buzzfax, outdoor pursuit-obsessed Hazel O'Connor-themed Peter Powell-fronted deluge of irritating chipperness Get Set For Summer had come to the end of its somewhat more conventional six week run. The week after, the very same programmes that had been bookended by 'Buzz' were left to fend for themselves in the continuity wilderness. Buzzfax lasted for one solitary week and was an experiment that was never to be repeated, and yet was so bewilderingly, well, bewildering that it burned itself indelibly into the memory of anyone who witnessed it. And yet this memory-searing may not even have been entirely down to 'Buzz' and his 888-troubling antics, as within its scheduling walls fell possibly the most disturbing, disorientating, disquieting and just plain inappropriate twenty five minutes ever to find their way into children's television. And no, it wasn't Edgar Kennedy.

First shown by the BBC in September 1979, Battle Of The Planets was infamously a redubbed re-edit of the 1972 Japanese animated series Science Ninja Team Gatchaman, which it's probably fair to say, what with its cross-dressing villains, neck-twisting wallops, 'choice' language and what have you, was originally aimed at a slightly older audience. It had been purchased by the massively-credited Sandy Frank Entertainment to cash in on the first throes of post-Star Wars spacemania, and retooled for wider merchandise-friendly Stateside consumption by cutting out whopping great inappropriate chunks, replacing them with new explanation-heavy linking footage featuring R5D4-infringing fretbucket 7-Zark-7 and his comedy electro-canine sidekick 1-Rover-1, adding a big walloping disco soundtrack, and generally renaming everyone, everything and everywhere until it was, to all intents and purposes, a different series.

Most of the time, though back-of-the-mind question marks did still remain over such widely-spotted anomalies as why Mark's metal bird throwing star thing caused the Spectra guards to recoil in incapacitated 'astonishment' or indeed what in the name of all that was suitable for the target audience was going on with a certain bit in the opening titles that we'll be coming back to very soon indeed, this audacious gambit worked and little of Battle Of The Planets' origins was perceptible to the untrained eye. Sometimes, however, much like when the BBFC tried and failed to make The Texas Chain Saw Massacre suitable for an 'X' certificate around the same time, the source material was simply too strong for any amount of re-editing to prevent its true nature from seeping through. And nowhere was this more obvious than in shudderingly-recalled two-part story The Fierce Flowers.

When the first part of The Fierce Flowers rolled up as an accident-rather-than-design component of Buzzfax, it wasn't actually the first time that it had been seen by an unsuspecting audience; over the Christmas of 1980, as part of a mighty school holiday mornings schedule that actually extended into the afternoon, and impressively included Chigley, California Fever and The Red Hand Gang alongside the expected likes of Lassie, Play Chess and Why Don't You...?, a couple of new episodes of Battle Of The Planets had sneaked out more or less under the radar. As they were shown on consecutive mornings in the no-man's land between Christmas and New Year when officially nothing ever happens and TV viewing-depleting visits to distant relatives are the order of the day, it's likely that most juvenile fans of the show missed one or both episodes, with only the briefest of glimpses of its bio-horror hardcore weirdness to play on their minds until the repeats rolled around. And when they did roll around, in that more accessible and noticeable Saturday morning slot, it's fair to say that The Fierce Flowers was what the young people call a 'game-changer'. But more on that in good time...

NEXT TIME: Princess' Pants, The Great 'Spaceburger' Shortage, and what people called 'Anime' before they knew it had a name...

ITV 59 - All Your ITV Favourites (And Here's Boomer) Part Five: Oracle

Well, it looks like it's one of those boring 'let's have a look at some of Britain's disappearing wildlife' bits in Tiswas/Good Morning Britain/That CITV One With The Family With The Teenage Son With The Ned's Atomic Dustbin T-Shirt, and so it's time to grab the remote and - after customarily hitting the wrong button three or four times - have a quick glance at Oracle!

Yes, Oracle - ITV's original Internet-trouncing teletext service, which if we're being honest about it sort of fulfilled a very different kind of purpose to its more celebrated BBC-catapulted counterpart Ceefax. Oracle nominally stood for Optional Reception of Announcements by Coded Line Electronics, and that 'Optional' bit was really what was important here; launched in the mid to late seventies (bafflingly, nobody seems to have any reliable idea of exactly when), at a time when ITV's broadcast hours were already wildly outstripping those of the BBC, there wasn't really very much scope or indeed need for a Pages From Ceefax-style out-of-hours promo/preview hoedown, and so people tended to alternate a quick adverts-averting glance at the blocky headlines with their regular ITV viewing, almost as if it was a separate channel in its own right. As such, and as we shall see, it didn't really need those same sort of attention-grabbing graphical splash screens that Ceefax routinely traded in, and was all a bit content-heavy as the youngsters have it, but there were still a few surprises along the way...

As you can no doubt deduce from the rather spartan Ipso-containers-turned-on-their-side logo, Oracle had an unnerving tendency to look somewhat more rickety and less solidly build than Ceefax, as though it was at risk of teetering over and collapsing in a pile of primary coloured lines at the bottom of the screen at any second. This structural uncertainty is also showcased in an example of a typical news menu page, featuring an almost comically quaint appeal to send in your newsworthy items by post, rare ITV showings for Newsround and Catterick, and the intriguing-sounding 'Report Froms'. And thirdly, here's some instructions on how to could get further info on something you'd seen in a TV show in the olden days before the coming of endless cascading flash menus that you can't work out how to navigate properly. £2.95? Getouddahere.

More staggering still than any requests for postal headline-lobbage or enthusiastically stated month-long wait for scrappy overpriced photocopied tie-in sheets was the fact that people really did genuinely used to rely on Oracle to keep them up to date with the latest up-to-the-minute football happenings. In the hope of drawing in further armchair rattle-rattlers who had thus far somehow managed to avoid TV, radio, newspapers and any actual football matches, Oracle would regularly deploy such attention-grabbing gambits as this quasi-animated logo variant apparently boasting a guest appearance from the thing off Entrance To Hades in Jet Set Willy, and a Video Nasty-fonted Bobby Moore writing 'exclusive' for Oracle. That's not 'exclusively'. Just 'exclusive'. Anyway, football fans should now be grateful we now live in a world where you can get all the latest soccertastic news by following Alan Sugar's football tweets as reinterpreted by Richard Herring.

Some rare excursions into Oracle-hewn graphic art next, and first up there's a TV Guide intro denoted by a telly with a stetson on it - no prizes for guessing that this hails from the era of Dallas-mania - followed by tediously typical learn-to-swim-young-man-learn-to-swim-era Thomas Cook-esque gender-politically-dubious 'holiday' iconography, and finally some Oracle-bigging-up newspaper-dissing facts and figures that were no doubt staggering for the time but now seem almost hilariously obsolete in the age of Caitlin Moran scurrying behind a 'paywall', which for some reason are accompanied by Mr. Noseybonk having a good peruse of his new remote control. Wonder if he's noticed the missing numbers yet?

Occasionally, and slightly more visually arrestingly, you would also encounter a rendering of an ITV region's ident. Though normally, for obvious reasons, you would only ever get your own regional insignia - above you can see STV and Central, both bewilderingly coming across as even more geometrically ramshackle than the originals, and TV-am's that-bit-at-the-end-of-The-Mr.-Men stripy blur (and yes, Roland's 'pad' will be getting its own entry in due course) - no doubt occasioning some disconcertingly thorough individuals to fashion their own makeshift I-Spy Book Of Teletext-Fashioned Idents to mark off whilst visiting ITV-disparate relatives across the country. You could have been watching unlisted Anglia-only repeats of The Secret Service, you fools!

One of the more ambitious uses of the angle-edged artistic effects at Oracle's disposal was Park Avenue, a daily soap opera ostensibly written by one 'Robbie Burns', which didn't so much deal in EastEnders (When It Was Good)-level taboo-challenging as it did those that might have been proposed by a writer spluttering "I have a horsey... neigh... neigh" at a Waggoners Walk script meeting. Some enterprising genius (sorry, we did try to find your name to credit you, but it was like trying to find the cinema listings on Oracle) has preserved an entire 'episode' and collated it into the animated masterpiece you see before you. People really did used to follow this, you know.

Meanwhile, seeing as how as it was really just mostly the same content as Oracle only with slightly different colours so nobody would ever suspect a thing, there isn't really very much point in running an individual entry on Channel 4's own Teletext service 4-Tel, so we'll just mention their even more ambitious daily running serial - the deeply hallucinogenic exploits of existential blue hound 4-T, seen here riddling with some Disney-qesue talking chess pieces - here. In the next frame he called them 'TVS Archive-Blocking Basts' and thew them in a bin.

Sadly, Oracle would end up losing out in the controversial (well, with fans of T-Bag) ITV franchise reshuffle of 1992, meaning that from 1st January 1993 it was replaced by Teletext, whose imaginative name tells you all that you need to know about how diverting their actual content was. Any reputation that Teletext may have seems to rest solely on Bamboozle, a bafflingly popular daily quiz in which The Dad From Happy Days posed such posers as "WHICH of the following is a popular Lenny Henry sitcom? A) CHEF B) DOG C) TACO D) LEDERHOSEN". Other than that, absolutely nothing controversial, noteworthy or in any way interesting happened on Teletext at all ever.

The Fifty Eighth Annual Academy Salute To Seventy Six Million Years Of The BBC Part 3: Ceefax

Erm… hang on a second… just getting to page 198… almost there… right! Welcome, one and all, to the third part of our celebration of the visual ephemera that the BBC used to put out whenever they didn’t have any actual programmes to show. We’ve already witnessed the evolution of the Test Card, and its subsequent Genghis Khan-style sweep across the broadcasting map, and today it’s the turn of recently-retired BBC teletext service Ceefax. Apparently deriving its name from a corruption of ‘See’ and ‘Facts’ (two words which were barely applicable to the malfunction-prone service), Ceefax was launched in 1974 with a whopping thirty pages of content. That’s nearly as much as cutleryandpasties.blogspot.com.

One of the initial thirty pages was, as you’ll be far from surprised to hear, the index. And as you can see above, even in this early incarnation it wasn’t really that different to how the index page looked right up to the end. Including this here is a bit like putting a not-noticeably-different-to-the-finished-version demo on a 2CD Deluxe Edition Remaster. If we were to start chronicling microscopic changes in page layout over the years, it would soon descend into the depths of ‘in 1981 but only in regions able to pick up the East Midlands transmitter every third Sunday the upper line of the blue portion at the top of the page was moved six millimetres to the left but then they had to move it back again due to the ‘politically correct brigade : (' and it is not something which is a rule and one which doesn’t have to be complied with thank you’ territory.

So instead, we’re going to be concentrating on what can best be described as the ‘splash pages’ – in other words, those that introduced specific sections with viewer-bamboozling attempts at rendering illustrative images ‘in’ Ceefax. After all, despite what a million wacky parodies would have you believe, they tend to be what everyone remembers about Ceefax (though technically what everyone ‘remembers’ about Ceefax is 4-T the blue dog thing, except that was actually on 4-Tel and so will not be appearing here under any circumstances). Anyway, before moving on to said viewer-bamboozling renditions, it’s worth pointing out that this particular archive index page includes links to Test Card ‘A’ and Test Card ‘B’. Well, if you were going to replicate those tedious assemblages of lines and grey in anything…

Arguably the most famous and well-remembered of these, apart from the Ceefaxised Dalek that plugged subtitles for early eighties Doctor Who, was this frequently-glimpsed introduction to the weather pages, heralded by a blocky rendition of one of those medieval pictures of the sun that Minnie Driver appears to have based her entire face on. Sadly, albeit with a pleasing note of optimism, they didn’t see fit to vary the image depending on climatic conditions.

If there was one thing that Ceefax ‘art’ was ideally suited to, it was ‘sport’ in the days when all individual sporting pursuits were bracketed together into one big on-the-bus-or-off-the-bus schoolbag-inspiring generic conceptual gambit. Hence the Ceefax designers wasted no time in bookending their equally generic sport pages with aesthetically-challenging collages featuring a four-sided cricket bat, the world’s smallest FA Cup, and what experts believe to be an elongated multicoloured fly swat. Similar honours would be performed for Wimbledon each year by this giant marble next to one of the Play School windows, helpfully rendered in green and white so you knew it was ‘tennis’.

Meanwhile, the television pages deployed a cunning variant on the ‘window’ gambit, placing it subtly next to a TV that appears to be being used to play High Noon on the ZX Spectrum. Which is admittedly a rather niche-targeted joke, but you’ll be wanting those same high precision sharp-shootin’ skills when the other player blows a hole in the cactus.

Travel news, on the other hand, had to make do with this static image taken from the unreleased post-Knight Lore ‘isometric’ remake of legendary ZX Spectrum game Horace Goes Skiing. Another joke that will be entirely lost on anyone who never owned a ZX Spectrum, and would also be lost on anyone who did own a ZX Spectrum but never played Horace Goes Skiing or indeed one of the ‘isometric’ games, except for the fact that science has proven the existence of such people to be a statistical impossibility. And that’s yet another one-sentence joke aimed at a small subsector of readers stretched way beyond the point where it was actually funny. If only they’d used Pssst! or Ah Diddums for something…

…though they did use Valhalla. Hey, non-ZX Spectrum owners, come back!!

Hang on a minute… Parky? What’s he doing here?! Don’t start adjusting your set just yet – unfortunately, despite extensive research, it’s proved impossible to locate any footage from Buzzfax, the bizarre and unsurprisingly short-lived 1981 experiment which saw Saturday morning children’s television introduced ‘by’ Ceefax, complete with blockified artistic impressions of The Monkees, The Banana Splits and Battle Of The Planets, and the ‘voice’ of Ceefax provided by the ‘voice’ of Jig Off Of Jigsaw, so Mr. Parkinson has generously agreed to appear as an illustration in its place. Anyway, that’s the last we’ll be seeing of him.

Even in the days before you could broadcast your inability to spell or use grammar or punctuation correctly to the world via text messages and Twitter, Ceefax was a keen pioneer of techno-interactivity, using nothing more sophisticated than stamps, envelopes and letterboxes. Take, for example, this pretty impressively-rendered request for festive missives. There’s a halfway decent ‘frost’ effect on the windows and everything. The only drawback is that it seems to be suggesting that viewers should trudge through several inches of snow all the way to the BBC’s Ceefax headquarters in Wood Lane, in order to post their Christmas jokes in a postbox, which will then be delivered to, erm, the BBC’s Ceefax headquarters in Wood Lane. “Knock Knock” – “Who’s there?” – “Jean-Paul Sartre”…

…and as if to further the illogicality, what we ended up with was a viewer-submitted ‘joke’ hinging entirely on the ridiculous conceit that a snowman really does – as Roy Wood suggested – ‘bring the snow’, and that having done so will then pursue the rather suicidal option of relaxing in a nice warm bed. Bet The O-Men from Jigsaw wished they’d thought of that one…

What’s that? Another incredibly specific reference point that’s alienating a large percentage of readers? Well, yes, but at least that one wasn’t about the ZX Spectrum. Time to sign off then, with the aid of that gigantically-tongued cat which invariably appeared at the end of Pages From Ceefax, that random selection of slightly soft-focus pages that so often appeared before proper television ‘started’. And did not, under any circumstances, have any music playing behind it ever. Anyway, hope you’ve enjoyed this similarly random selection of similarly slightly soft-focus Pages From Ceefax, and we’ll see you next time for the noble art of pretending to ‘shoot’ some dots…

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If you've enjoyed this article, you can find lots more about stuff you just don't see on television any more in Not On Your Telly, which is available in paperback here or from the Kindle Store here.