Goodbye Red Button News. Breakfast will never be the same again

The end is nigh. From the 30th of this month the BBC will end their Red Button TV news service.  It's going to mean a whole new way of having breakfast in Chez Angie.

I think it must have been in about 1979 that we bought a television that displayed Teletext – a digital information service from the BBC (who called it CEEFAX) and ITV (ORACLE). Unrepentant technophobes, we were the first in our circle of friends to have one.

In those pre-Internet days it was an instant hit with the whole family. Now mum and dad could read the news and weather forecast at any time of the day, the kids could access pages of jokes and quizzes and we could check programme listings on all 3 channels (remember that?) without buying the Radio Times or a daily newspaper.

To modern eyes the graphics look crude and, even after a 'fast text' service was introduced, there could be a l-o-n-g wait for ones chosen page to appear, but it was still a lot quicker than waiting for the next news bulletin. Moreover, unlike the news on TV or radio, one could skip stories that were of little interest.  

Breakfast time assumed a new pattern. Cereals and coffee were now consumed in the lounge while we caught up with the news of the day, starting on CEEFAX page 101, then page 160 for the local stuff and rounding it off with page 400 for the weather.

CEEFAX finally succumbed to the digital age in 2012, but long before that we had upgraded to a TV that accessed the BBC's Red Button Service. It was much faster than CEEFAX though the pattern was very similar. Initially, even the page numbers were the same. One little extra that we appreciated, though, was that we could read local news for regions other than our own, so since moving to Gloucestershire we've been able to keep abreast of news from Cornwall.

Back in 2015 the BBC announced their intention to phase out this hang-over from the Teletext age, but then appeared to have second thoughts. The old page number-based service survived for older televisions, but for those of us able to access it, the new red-button service was really rather good, with somewhat edited versions of the news stories from the BBC website and the excellent smartphone app.  Here are a couple of screen shots from this morning's news...

Now we are to lose it. "There are lots of ways to keep up with BBC News on your other devices" declares the ever-confident BBC, but none deliver a text service that can be enjoyed in company.  Caroline Abrahams, a director of AgeUK, made a point that is not applicable to our situation, but is still a good one. "Millions of older people,"  she wrote, "do not use computers and so for them this is the end of news delivered in this way. This so-called digital divide really is becoming more significant in our society. It is tremendously important that those older people who are on the wrong side of it are not disadvantaged or, worse still, completely shut out as a result."  But by the end of this month, shut out they will be.

For our part, we will probably tune in to the 7.55am local news and the 8am main news headlines. Then, to get the news from our old homeland, we'll switch to iPlayer and watch the previous day's news from Spotlight Southwest.

Sky News have a sort-of alternative – a menu of news story videos that's available as an app on our Internet-enabled TV. We looked at them this morning but they failed to impress.  Notice, by the way, how 'US News' comes before the rest of the world and the UK. I think that says a lot about Sky's world view.

Sadly, but predictably, BBC Weather is going the same way as the News, so we also checked out a collection of alternative apps.  Best of the mediocre bunch was this one from Macropinch.

Nice of them, I thought, to fill a quarter of the screen with a rain cloud graphic. The wavy line on the right is supposed to indicate temperature, but doesn't have a scale. As I drove to my friend Bridget's home this afternoon in a torrential downpour, I recalled Macropinch's Moderate Rain forecast and resolved to rely, henceforth, on the far superior Met Office smartphone app. For the benefit of those sharing breakfast time with me, I'll even read it aloud.


Postscript

This was the Met Office forecast for Lydney this morning – less than 5% chance of rain, and sunshine by noon.  That silly Macropinch app was forecasting rain all morning.

Fancying a brisk 4 mile walk , I dressed lightly and headed into the Forest. Not 5 minutes from home, it began to drizzle – just a passing shower, I reasoned.  Then it rained... heavily... and kept raining. Unusually for me, I abandoned my walk and turned for home.

I arrived home wet and bedraggled.  Outside, it continued to rain for most of the morning.

Perhaps Macropinch are not such silly people, after all.