The end of ITV regional Teletext

mb21's excellent Teletext Museum has a page dedicated to ITV ancillary services. From what I remember, many of the images and text started out on Darren Meldrum's MHP page back in 1996-97, later transferring to mb21 at the end of that decade.

(I was having some trouble with mb21's website recently - it would load about two or three pages at a time and then the entire site would go down, but if the links don't work it's all on Web Archive)

Some pages were updated around 1999, but most of the images and information remain over two decades old, except for the Carlton page which has some images from January 2002 - these were actually contributed to the site by myself after getting a TV capture card the previous Christmas! But what's still missing is the end of the service, which quietly finished at the end of 2004 in a very sorry, outdated state.

I captured the closing days of the Carlton/LWT service at the time, and think I sent the images over but the site never got updated. As far as I'm aware they haven't appeared since elsewhere, so for those interested, here they are.

First off, here's how Carlton's page 600 looked in May of 2003, as you can see a slight revamp from its 2002 look as seen on the mb21 page:



By December 2004, no more Carlton and instead 'ITV1 London' greets us...



...except in the (by now very outdated) information about PDC, hidden from the front menu and where Carlton stubbornly clings on. (2-page GIF)



The transmitter information page was updated until (almost) the very end, still listing work that finished seven months earlier:



If you switched on before 9:30, you got GMTV Text instead, the December 2004 front page looking fairly similar to mb21's captures from November 1999, but with different pages.



After 9:30 on a Friday and all weekend, you got an ITV1 LWT front page, with a completely different graphical design to the former Carlton page:



From what I remember, in January 2002 these pages looked identical to the "LWT PLUS" ones on mb21's site from December 1996, so I didn't bother capturing them at the time.

Transmitter information for London Weekend Television Television:



Like the Carlton service, the PDC pages retain the old LWT logo (2-page GIF):



This I wasn't expecting to find - information about ITV's 'Year of Promise' which by then was half a decade out of date! All three subpages here:





A few test pages which someone better technically minded than me will understand:



And just for the hell of it, here's Ceefax and Teletext's front pages from Christmas Day 2004, plus an extra BBC festive greeting.





New Years Day 2005 and the regional pages are finally removed, showing this on page 600 instead. From memory this page could still be accessed for a good while, although by the end of the entire service in 2009 it was no longer available.



Hope that was interesting and/or nostalgic to some anyway!

Haha! I'd forgotten about PDC. We used to call it Pretty Damned Complicated. ISTR it was a pain in the arse.

Wasn't that complicated. Some video recorders IIRC used it automatically, others you had to tell it to use the PDC and I think it was many ITV regions that were late to the game on implementing it. Was excellent on occasion if you wanted to record something after a football match for example and it had gone into extra time - you'd still get the programme.

It was a pain for broadcasters ISTR - which may be what deejay is referring to...

It regularly used to go wrong, causing lots of complaints about missed recordings. (Think the issue was that the PDC handling for playout was a bit of a kludge, as systems weren't originally designed with it in mind? Though the Germans had their simpler VPS system before PDC came along so some must have supported it?)

I think one aspect of PDC that confused was that whilst PDC used teletext data to send the record start/stop/delay etc. data - it wasn't initially designed to be interfaced with teletext listings pages (though that functionality is now in the ETSI spec) - and that integration then ended up varying between manufacturers ISTR?

As those who watch the occasional preview snippets on the TV WHIRL twitter feed will know, I currently have some pages from HTV West (by then being referred to as ITV1 West) being prepped which date from towards the end of 2004. By this point it looks very much like they were using most of the same basic templates as the ITV London ones above, so presumably the same base template was being rolled out across the former Carlton-owned areas.

A fuller lot of this will be up on the website soon (probably once I'm back from holiday for a start), but for the time being have a few images from the latter days of ITV West:-





And a few of my favourites from the ancillary service, just to serve as a reminder of what a total mess of brands and names things still were even at this point:-

How were these being generated by this time, and how were they edited? I've seen relatively recent pictures where Ceefax pages were still being updated on BBC Micros surrounded by much more modern equipment. Was a more uptodate GUI frontend ever made for editing these pages, or were they still updated in the traditional way?

Before ITV Plc did each region produce its own pages in the 600s? If so, I'm guessing Carlton/LWT produced a combined service rebadged depending on the day of the week?

From what I recall, Carlton and LWT's text services had different content.

Yes each region had its own 600 service, but they all launched at various times after 1/1/93. The earliest I know about was Westcountry's which was one of, if not the first.


The 600 pages and 888 were the responsibility of the ITV companies (same for the 300 range and 888 with channel 4) so that had to get at least the subtitling side ready for 1993. Though I remember seeing captions apologising for the lack of subtitles on programmes in those first few days because they weren't working

Yes, although a lot of it was similar especially the page numbers. Only to be expected as they were both produced by Intelfax

In London there were 3 teletext services on 600 as it became GMTV Text in the mornings

I remember a holding page was used before regions launched their text service which was branded as 'ITV Plus'.

At one point the GMTV text service and the YTV one were different, switching at 6.00 and 9.25. In later years both services were available 24/7 with GMTV content on pages 640-649.