Pages from Ceefax

For all of about five minutes on BBC2 now (1.55am) - what exactly is the point? (apart from keeping those of you who like the music happy - and in my drunken state I'd include myself in that ).

Well unless you want someone to sing and dance for you, there's not much else you can do in five minutes really. Because we all know that if they filled the gap with trailers, people would moan about it.

A convenient filler to get BBC Scotland back in to the network schedule?

No, it's so the Learning Zone can start bang on 2am.

I think that the BBC should scrap showing 'Pages from Ceefax' altogether. BBC TWO has only in the last 6 months started to make use of showing BBC NEWS 24 as a way to fill the gap between BBC TWO programmes finishing and BBC LEARNING ZONE starting. I think that a 5 min gap should just show a yellow BBC TWO screen saying 'Programmes Resume at 2.00am with BBC Learning Zone' on top of a static bounce ident. Using Pages From Ceefax is very dated now...

Before the rights of such things became too expensive, gaps like this used to be filled with cartoons.

Alright, perhaps not at 0200Hrs.

...despite it being much superior to BBCi in terms of content and quality.
Ceefax information is the most appropriate thing to show - A slide is hardly interesting, and BBCi is unsulitable bue to design and content quality.

I also think that the viewer count is so low at that time of night there is no need for fancy graphics etc. - Nightscreen has all these posh stings and graphics which look much better than ITV1s presentation but next to no viewers to enjoy them - they should have stuck with the Powerpoint-style graphics pre-2002.

Apparently this week and last week Ceefax-AM has been broadcast on BBC-2 Scotland from 6.00am till 7.00am. Yep, an hour of music with Pages from Ceefax!

This is definitely preferable to broadcasting the same thing on BBC ONE and BBC TWO for an hour - irrespective of what time of the day it happens to be.

I do wish though that they'd vary the selection of pages being broadcast - some Sport, Entertainment and programme listings pages might make it slightly more interesting.

I noticed intermittent green flashes the other night during a late BBC TWO Ceefax In-Vision broadcast. Problem with a cable perhaps?

Oh my God!

That probably means the charter won't be renewed!

Merely an observation Nicholas. This is a presentation forum, is it not?

Although the presentation of Ceefax is hugely dated, its content remains excellent.
Ironically, the quality of Ceefax has actually deteriorated in the last few years, as previously a level two teletext generator was used to generate pages from Ceefax, but since it broke, a level one generator has been used.
I fail to understand how a replacement level two (or even level three or four) generator could be too expensive for the BBC to produce.
Is there an explanation for this?