IT’S THE FINAL COUNTDOWN [481]

Instead of always thinking about the next article, I have been persuaded to look back on my writing in the last year. Without going into all fifty-one of them, I have compiled lists of my ten most-read articles published in 2024 – fortunately, I am happy with the quality of all of them – followed by five that I think should get an extra mention.

I don’t see any deliberate connections between approach or subject matter between them, which is a good thing, as I don’t want to be tied down to a predictable formula. However, I do see that they are the products of reactions, either to personal experience or to the news. There is scope for more approaching subjects in a more creative fashion, and to go into greater depth on some subjects, so do expect some experimentation in 2025 – judging from what topped the most-read list below, I had better start exploring approaches to cybernetics, and the cyber-society in which we find ourselves.

I can see the articles listed below cover a lot of ground, which I hope is an indication of confidence. My five hundredth article will appear here during 2025, most definitely the result of perseverance from week to week. Oddly enough, it is only during this year that a couple of ground rules have made themselves known to me: aim to pass five hundred words, but hope to reach a thousand; and attempt to sum up the point you want to make in the first sentence, like how the below piece about Jaguar began: “Creativity doesn’t have to make sense to you personally, even in advertising.” I may have got that last idea from reading something about Stephen King.

Eight out of the ten most-read articles were been published in the last three months, which I have put down to my having ditched Twitter in favour of Bluesky – my handle is @leighspence.bluesky.social – which thankfully feels like the egalitarian Twitter of old. Having locked my “X” account in response to its owner’s twisting the site’s experience out of all recognition, the switch to Bluesky pretty much confirms that links to external sites from “X” were being throttled – once my local bus company stops using “X” for service updates I am deleting the app altogether. I hope to use social media more in 2025 to let people know what they can find here, now that the dust from the social media square-dance-stampede is settling.

And so, here is the list of my most-read articles published during 2024:

1. LIKE A SHOCK TO THE SYSTEM (published 28/01/2024): nailing down a working definition of “cybernetics”, for when I eventually plan to write about cybernetics. With control and communication being key factors across the definitions I found of the word, I can only guess this is a subject that people found important, and not just entertaining to read about.

2. AND NOTHING TO GET HUNG ABOUT (24/03/2024): rediscovering “Seinfeld”, the sitcom that initially made no impact in the UK, having been relegated to midnight screening on BBC Two when Parliament was not in recess, and how it was my little secret before DVDs and streaming made it more accessible. Jerry Seinfeld made some controversial statements when promoting his new film “Unfrosted”, so I guess that added to the interest. 

3. YOU SAW THE WHOLE OF THE MOON (13/10/2024): why did ITV station Meridian Broadcasting use a half-sun, half-moon face to present television in the south of England? See under “things that lived rent-free in my head for years”.

4. BUT STILL THEY COME! (03/11/2024): being bombarded by “Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version of The War of the Worlds” in a busy shop. I don’t think I made clear that I loved listening to the album in full, but that visceral experience in HMV in Oxford Street led me to leave the store empty-handed, hardly the outcome the staff wanted.

5. TOO BUSY DODGING BETWEEN THE FLAK (10/11/2024): Donald Trump is re-elected, but I already talked about him the last time around – unlike him, I didn’t feel like re-litigating the past so, like this list, I linked to what I’ve mentioned before.

6. WE FADE TO GREY (27/10/2024): Fiat won’t sell you a grey car, as it’s not “La Dolce Vita”. This was a case of “I beg your pardon?” upon finding out both that the favourite new car colour in the UK is grey, and that Fiat saw fit to respond.

7. LIKE SUGAR AND SPICE (20/10/2024): Coca-Cola Spiced, a short-lived drink where “spiced” meant “with raspberry”. I had bought the drink, was underwhelmed about it, and with its withdrawal being announced not long afterwards, I could understand why...

8. GONE FISHIN’  (17/11/2024): the nostalgic, Proustian delights of a McDonald’s Filet-O-Fish – this one literally wrote itself, including the snap back to reality about burgers being a “sometimes” food.

9. BOYS ALWAYS WORK IT OUT (06/10/2024): constructing an article using Brian Eno’s “Oblique Strategies” card set. This one became as much of an introspective work as this article was, and has many lessons for 2025, including: “Don’t give yourself enough time to decipher or question your methods. Ritual leads the way. Deadline is style. You are in there somewhere.”

10. I’LL CALL YOU JAGUAR IF I MAY BE SO BOLD (24/11/2024): the reinvention of Jaguar, after people stopped noticing their cars. I felt indignant about the lazy use of “woke” being used to describe a creative endeavour, regardless of it being one from a multi-billion pound company, and that made this article very easy to write.

...and here is my personal list of honourable mentions:

ON WITH THE SHOW, THIS IS IT (07/04/2024) and MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG (14/04/2024): a work performance review leads into a two-part exploration of Bugs Bunny, the witty and fearless cartoon character and queer role model.

SAY HELLO, WAVE GOODBYE (31/03/2024): the death in March 2024 of Wave 105, a very popular radio station that served its local area until its owners realised the license could be fulfilled with less effort, reducing it to local news and ads on a national network. (Since then, two other stations in the same area, Nation Radio and BBC Radio Solent, took on nearly all of Wave 105’s on-air staff, with Nation Radio becoming a more local station in the process – where there’s a will...)

IF YOU’RE ALRIGHT, YOU CAN’T GO WRONG (18/02/2024): celebrating the career of Steve Wright, the immensely popular radio presenter, and discovering how he built the signature sound of his shows. “His public modesty about his own career is admirable, and while he never really got personal on air, you were always left with the impression that he was a thoroughly sincere and hard-working man.”

I'VE SEEN THAT MOVIE TOO (28/04/2024): although prompted by Jerry Seinfeld’s Pop-Tarts comedy biopic “Unfrosted”, the opening sentence, for a look at how Hollywood’s demise has been predicted many time, is definitely that of a film scholar: “To make your debut as a feature film director by declaring the death of the film industry is a trick that Jean-Luc Godard sadly missed.”

DID I TELL YOU EVERYTHING IS FINE (15/09/2024): defining “Pages from Ceefax” as a genre of music, taking in the nostalgia of watching, and listening, to teletext pages filling the gaps between TV programmes.

DID I TELL YOU EVERYTHING IS FINE [466]

I came very late to Al Jarreau’s song “Mornin’”, a quite irrepressibly positive piece of smooth jazz with electric piano and strings, and a hybrid animated and live action video to match. It is very easy on the ear.

On my first listen, my first thought was, “this is a bit Pages from Ceefax, isn’t it?”, which is not as obscure a thought as it sounds. Certainly, David Foster’s original instrumental version of “Mornin’” fits that description completely.

Ceefax, the BBC’s teletext service that began in 1974, was initially only seen by owners of sets capable of decoding that part of the TV signal. Meanwhile, with BBC One and Two only broadcasting a few daytime shows outside of the Open University, schools programmes and live events, a test card and music was played to fill the gaps. From 1980, a rotating series of news, weather and information named “Ceefax in Vision”, later “Pages from Ceefax”, began replacing the test card, while continuing to play music. This arrangement was still seen during the day on BBC television as late as 1990, later relegated to early morning and at the end of the day until the end of analogue TV transmissions closed Ceefax in 2012. 

Being of an age where I would have seen “Pages from Ceefax” during the day, I recognised that the music being played was not often heard elsewhere. Without exception, instrumental tracks were played, i.e. no singing, and they were often light or easy listening in nature, or bland an inoffensive at worst. Until 1988, there were still restrictions on the amount of recorded music being broadcasted in the UK, known as “needletime”, so this music would come from sources either exempt from these rules, like foreign recordings, or by licensing cheaper library and production music.

 

The “foreign recordings” element was often literal: VHS recordings of “Pages from Ceefax” posted to YouTube don’t often have the music picked up by their content ID system, although I found one 1995 example that used the 1981 album “Flashing” by the Japanese jazz pianist Himiko Kikuchi, or another from 1983 using the 1971 album “Sentimentálna trúbka” by the Slovak American trumpeter Laco Déczi.  However, British musicians and composers would also travel to Germany to record, with renowned library music names like Neil Richardson, Alan Moorhouse, Johnny Pearson and Keith Mansfield appearing under pseudonyms like “The Oscar Brandenburg Orchestra”.

 

Even at the end of Ceefax in 2012, the BBC were still using library music, this time more recent recordings licensed from Funtastik Music, which to me sounded more stereotypically like the “elevator music” under which the earlier tracks could be classified. Notably, the final song played was “B.A.R.T.”  a commercially-released song by Ruby, a rock band that featured Tom Fogerty of Creedence Clearwater Revival, and better known from being played between gaps in BBC schools programmes. This was more a nod to the end of laid-back presentation that could no longer take place in a time when TV channels need to continuously hold the viewer’s attention – no longer can BBC Two casually open up at 9.30am, warn viewers that coverage of the TUC Conference begins in two minutes, then play “Nifty Digits” by Richard Harvey, as they did on 9^th September 1982, according to the YouTube channel that put up the recording.

 

But the earlier popularity of light music under big bands and jazz performers like Bert Kempfaert and Oscar Peterson, and the later existence of groups like The Test Card Circle point to the continued popularity of music of this type on its own terms, even down to CD reissues of production music albums made by labels like Bruton Music and KPM originally not meant for general sale. In this case, my brain has labelled it by where I heard that kind of music most, therefore as “Pages from Ceefax”.

THE TRUTH IS IN WHAT YOU SEE [386]

On Monday 3rd April 2023, the BBC will launch “BBC News”, a new 24-hour TV news channel replacing both BBC World News and the domestic BBC News Channel, known on-screen as simply “BBC News”, which launched as BBC News 24 in September 1997. With both channels merged into one service a month ahead of the relaunch, the final UK-only hour of the BBC News Channel was broadcast from 5pm on Friday 3rd March, which I watched on my phone while on the way home from work... and there lies the problem.

 

There was a time when I had BBC News 24 constantly on in the background at home, turning my room into a hotel foyer. It was my major source of the latest news, along with the BBC’s teletext service Ceefax (which I talked about here). But around the time it renamed as the BBC News Channel in 2008, I gained access to broadband internet, starting my shift towards getting most of my news online, even if still led by BBC News, live streaming and reports now even more immediate than television can provide.

 

Sharing programmes between the BBC’s two news channels has happened since the launch of BBC News 24, and if the bulletins weren’t shared, the stories often were. The UK feed of the new “BBC News” channel will be able to break in with, well, UK-based breaking news, just like live news pages appear on the BBC News website. If I don’t catch one, I will catch the other.

 

With the new channel broadcasting worldwide, opting out at various points for UK news, this relaunch could be seen as the death of the domestic news channel through cost cutting. With BBC World News being a commercial enterprise, and not funded by the UK’s TV licence fee, there is an argument for the BBC preserving that which makes money to make more programmes, but BBC World News also reaches nearly a hundred million people every week, a major example of British cultural soft power emulated by English-language channels from broadcasters like NHK of Japan, TRT from Turkey, and Al-Jazeera in Qatar. 

 

Meanwhile, audiences to UK news channels are usually measured in the tens of thousands. The commercial Sky News, arguing in 1999 that a publicly funded news channel was unfair and illegal under EU law, a complaint rejected by the European Commission, has not made money since it launched in 1989. The audiences of the right-leaning GB News and Talk TV, both having launched relatively recently, remain small.

 

Changes in newsgathering have also accelerated in recent years. Appearing on the BBC News Channel once involved travelling to its studio in London, or one of several regional centres across the UK, or being interviewed by reporters whose cameras were connected to satellite trucks, or whose footage would later be compiled in an edit suite. Now, particularly following the pandemic, contributors mostly appear from their homes, or anywhere at all, using their own computers and phones, the inevitable decline in picture and quality accepted and tolerated by both audiences and the BBC in pursuit of the news. Live reports to TV can use mobile internet to provide the link, just as reports can similarly be completed at the scene and uploaded to the channel’s production team.

 

The news eats through media, from newspapers to radio, through to television and online. This has just been the latest part of that process.

AND PLAIN TO SEE THE FACTS ARE CHANGING [131]

Memories are short. Instant access to information via the World Wide Web has only been available to the general public since August 1991, with mobile and broadband internet only becoming commonplace in the last fifteen years. However, if you had the right television, instant recall of news, sport and financial updates, TV and radio listings and even recipes, was possible as early as 1974, before the first home computers appeared. Look down at your remote control, and the remnants of Teletext will stare back, marking where the information superhighway begins.

The world’s first teletext service was the BBC’s CEEFAX (“See Facts”), launched in 1974, following two years of testing technology developed by Philips, which had already launched the first consumer video recorders by then, and were readying what would become the LaserDisc and Compact Disc. The BBC had already been experimenting with “BEEBFAX” in the late 1960s, using TV transmitters to broadcast a page of information overnight, not unlike a newspaper page, to be printed on a fax machine-like printer at home. This project was shelved because the printer was too noisy, but with Philips proposing to use the screen, work started again.

The way teletext worked is down to how old televisions worked, in ways that are still well known to many. Put extremely simply, the reason not all 625 lines are broadcast to make up a TV picture is because the top and bottom of each field of lines is left blank to denote where the picture starts and ends, literally creating the “vertical blanking interval,” also known as the black bar that rolled down the screen on analogue TVs when the channel was not properly tuned in – horizontal blanking intervals also take up some of the width, and digital television makes sure you see none of this at all.

Teletext used the spare lines from the vertical blanking interval to broadcast a cycle of digital code that creates each frame of text. When you enter a three-digit code for the page you want, like 430 for travel news, you would then see the number scroll through the cycle as it is broadcast, until it reaches your page – popular pages were broadcast more than once. Each “magazine” of pages was broadcast on its own line, usually grouped by subject, to a maximum of eight lines. When subtitles for TV programmes were added from 1981, the page for this was usually placed at the end: it was originally 170, and eventually ended up at 888. Each page also had a number of frames, for longer news items and other stories, for which you may need the “hold” button on your remote control.

Later, hyperlinks to other sections of teletext were possible by red, green, yellow and blue “FastText” buttons. A “Reveal” button was also available for parts of pages, like revealing a punchline for a joke. Blocky pictures were also possible using the palette of eight colours, which included the black background, and breaking news could be left to scroll along the bottom of your screen while you continued to watch TV.

Ceefax would grow slowly at the BBC in the 1970s. Initially a staff of nine would write the original thirty-page magazine, broadcast on a single line, which were punched onto paper computer tape, and sent to a different floor of BBC Television Centre to broadcast them – updates only happened on weekdays, as everyone went home for the weekend. From 1981, the BBC Micro computer was used to create pages, and could be received at home with an adaptor – basic computer programs were also broadcast using teletext. Viewers in the UK will also be used to “Pages from Ceefax” filling in gaps on BBC television during the day when there were no TV programmes to show.

Of course, this is all gone now – digital teletext was introduced in 1999, using information from Ceefax, but by the time the end of analogue TV killed off Ceefax in 2012, it was using text from the BBC’s website, and some of the sections could only be found online, because it was just easier. A similar text service that used your phone line, Prestel, allowing you to buy items and view your bank account at home from 1976, had already ended by 1992, mainly because it was cheaper to make a regular phone call for what you needed. 

Even looking at the “BBC Red Button” service today through my TV, it is cut down even from when it began, almost to the point where there is no longer a need for it. However, teletext was built because a need for it was found, a need that continued to find ways to fulfil itself.

EVERY DAY I WRITE THE BOOK [130]

Two pages from the diary of Kenneth Williams

Monday

Is there any point to keeping a diary? You know what you did, and how you feel – is it for reference, or to confront yourself, or as a writing exercise? The last of these was my reason for having first begun a diary fifteen years ago, but also why it has petered out – I have other outlets for that sort of thing, outlets more than one person can see. I could do with a way to collate all those disparate thoughts you have during the week, those ideas that felt like a good idea at the timer, but they let you go before you remember to write them down.

Tuesday

So how did Ceefax work anyway? And why did my mind make me think of this? And why am I now entertaining this as a subject for a future article, instead of looking it up? Teletext is still a recent history for most – oh yeah, that’s why it’s a good idea.

Wednesday

Of course, today is when you actually started writing your diary, in the hope that, when you read through it as preparation for the inevitable autobiography, you will have forgotten what kind of procrastinating person you once were, only to have that thought hit you once again.

Thursday

Of course, your energies were concentrating on work during the week, and there are times where you have nothing to write down, but the idea of skipping an entire day seems about as perverse as making a note that, by the way, nothing else happened – it may be easier to make a note of that having been the case, and move on.

Friday

A manager at work said I had a good speaking voice, but I then decided to say it sounded like it was full of disdain – it was rather a pointless call. I am not exactly sure why I said that, but it does sound like I was being too honest while making a joke. I don’t like taking phone calls. I’ve had the latest iPhone for two weeks, and made one call on it so far.

Saturday

Napping in the afternoon, I dreamt I was walking, then my right foot slipped, I fell forward – and I woke up. This joins other weird dreams of this week, which included retrieving papers, from a red post box in a high street, that I needed for when I was starring in a TV detective drama – a type of show I never, ever watch – and the dream where I found forty-five pence on the floor. I should have gone for a walk, but it was raining – that is, in real life.

Sunday

Wrote an article about “Friday the 13th: A New Beginning” for His & Hers Movie Reviews – it is their Halloween Horror month, and I rarely watch horror films, but I may write a horror film one day, or some sort of horror story. If science fiction portrays our anxieties about the future, then horror does the same for the present.