SOME time after midnight tonight I will say a last goodbye to a dear old friend.
The companion in question has been part of my life for the best part of 30 years, through good times, bad times, indifferent times, through the big events of recent history – the Falklands War, the fall of the Berlin Wall, 9/11 and Mr Blobby becoming the Christmas number one.
At various moments over the past three decades, this friend has prompted me to laugh, to cry, to punch the air with euphoria and to sink to the depths of despair. It has not always been the smoothest of relationships, but it has endured and my loyalty has never wavered.
In a few hours’ time though, and without any wake or fanfare, it will all be over. By tomorrow, a part of world will be gone for ever.
The sun will continue to rise, the earth will carry on turning, Graham Norton will be on the telly again and there will still be a branch of Subway on every high street. But for me, life somehow will never be the same again.
So farewell then teletext, collateral damage of the North East Wales digital switchover. That is, as any fellow enthusiast of the televisual platform will know, teletext with a small ‘t’, the generic term that has come to embrace both Teletext (with a capital ‘t’), the ITV brand, and Ceefax, its BBC counterpart.
I vividly remember the day I became smitten. It was 1982 and I was visiting a mate in London who was eager to show off his new colour TV.
A ‘late adopter’ even in those distant days, I had hitherto only been vaguely aware of Ceefax and Oracle, as the ITV version was then called.
As far as I was concerned, it was just a kind of ersatz testcard that occasionally caught my eye when I had occasion to walk past a television shop during the daytime.
Its interactive dimension had, up until then, completely passed me by.
But that day as I bashed away at the number buttons on my friend’s remote control, this new creation seemed like one per cent technology and 99 per cent sorcery.
Time somehow stood still as I went through every page from 100 to 299, omnivorously devouring its entire content, including the joke of the day, the recipe of the week, the winning Premium Bond numbers and the weather in Dar Es Salaam.
Since that life-changing hour, teletext has maintained the power to charge me with every emotion – joy, melancholy, anger, frustration and, on occasions, mortal dread.
One April evening in 1985 as a young reporter on a morning newspaper in North East England, I was dispatched at short notice to cover an important mineworkers’ union meeting relating to the ongoing national strike.
As an avid Manchester United supporter I was not best pleased.
That night my team were involved in an FA Cup semi-final replay against deadly rivals Liverpool. I resolved to avoid any coverage of game, even keeping my car radio switched off in order to concentrate on the job in hand.
But afterwards with the meeting over and my copy duly filed, it was time to find out the result. Trouble was, by then, my nerves had built up such a head of steam that I could barely work the TV remote.
I had to take a walk around the block to calm myself down.
Back home I tuned into Ceefax, keyed in 302 for football headlines (like every teletext addict, the popular page numbers will remain engraved on my memory until take my eternal rest upon that great sofa in the sky) and with a thumping heart watched through barely-opened but perspiring fingers as the numbers counted upwards.
By the time they came to rest, I had covered one eye and four-fifths of the other.
Being hit with the entire headline in one go would be too much to bear. No, it had to be one word at a time. Here we go: United... march... on... to... Wembley. I dropped the remote, kissed the TV screen and swore my undying love to both Ceefax and Bryan Robson.
At other times I have followed entire matches through Teletext/Ceefax updates, a behind-the-sofa experience if ever there were one.
Long periods of nothing and then a brief but terrifying flicker of the screen when you know something has happened but have no idea whether it is a goal for, a goal against, a missed penalty, a red card or the match has been abandoned owing to a giant blancmange landing on the stadium.
Living with an addict cannot be easy of course, and the medium’s passing will bring relief to many a teletext widow (I was tempted to add ‘widower’ but the reality is, it’s very much a bloke thing).
My wife has often despaired as I have ignored cries to switch off a flaming toaster or a boiling pan until the TV screen has scrolled around to the story of the 150 year-old parrot or the one-legged man who has applied to be an astronaut.
Even for me, there have been moments when teletext has left me raging.
Like when they cram 10 pages of football reports under one number.
Rather than wait to read about your team, you nip out of the room to make a cup of tea but every time you come back, it’s just scrolled past the match you want.
Or when they’ve messed up the index and none of the page numbers match the right story.
The love has never died though, even today when the internet and the interactive red button persist in making flirty eyes at me.
Sadly, we live in a political era that is obsessed with modernity and, like it or not, we have a Government that insists we have digital everything – digital radio, digital TV, digital schools, digital workplaces. Soon we’ll have to wear digital clothes, eat digital food and produce digital children.
I tell a lie. I won’t be there to say farewell.
Like in some Stalinist purge, Teletext will, presumably, be slain in cowardly fashion under cover of night, while we, its faithful, sleep in our beds and dream about community pages, subtitles for the hard of hearing and the five-day pollen count for Tasmania.