Text on Text

Oddly enough this was something I was wondering today, wouldn't be it awful on confusing if you had to get a plane the night the clocks went back? For non-UK readers, the slightly archaic practise of putting the clocks back an hour so farmers and other morning people can work in the light persists here. And it happened this Sunday. The actual change comes at 3AM in order to minimize disruption, though of course the aeroplanes are still flying. You can understand how confusing that would be, say, around half two. Have you missed your 2:15 flight or is it in 45 minutes at the 'next' 2:15? Anyway you'd assume there is some flawless procedure to prevent such confusion. Gatwick airport decided instead, however, to heighten it.

Apparently a "glitch" meant that the clocks weren't set back at all in Gatwick. This meant all flights were displayed as an hour late. And just inside Gatwick, Gatwick's information is send directly to Ceefax and Teletext for display as well as there own website. See there's the tenuous link to teletext. Considering most people still use it to check on aeronautical comings and goings it no doubt did cause serious disruption, or at least muddled confusion.

Technological types are speculating that the computer's clock was simply set to the wrong country, therefore didn't know about daylight saving time. Seems too simple but I suppose you should never overestimate the competence of management or underestimate the laziness of workers.

Or analogue switch off. Whatever you call it, for this blog's purposes, it's the traditional style teletext switch off. And it begins tomorrow morning in Whitehaven. Well, it only sort of does. BBC2 is the only channel going off the terrestrial air tomorrow, the rest being removed later in the month. Now as far as I'm aware, there is no difference between the BBC2 Ceefax service and the BBC1 version, certainly it's minimal if there is. I think there used to be a few extra pages on BBC1 but think it's pretty much the same now. So in truth, no teletext is being removed tomorrow morning. By the 14th of next month, certainly all forms of traditional teletext and, arguably more significantly, the channels that carry them will be off the air. By 2012 the whole of the UK will be switched over. Will be interesting to see how long channels bother to maintain a traditional teletext service. As London is one of the last areas to switch over they should be reasonably well maintained, housing a fifth of the country's population should be enough to keep planet sound updated regularly anyway.

Apparently the main feature of Whitehaven which makes it such a good test switchover candidate is that it currently has terrible analogue reception. As you know, bad reception=no teletext, or at least very hard to read and navigate teletext. So perhaps Whitehaven, now no doubt to be immortalised in pub quizzes, is a bit of a false dawn for the Death of Teletext. That's right capitals. Even if it is, however, the major switchover's begin in the later part of next year. The large "Border" region is the first to go with a few others following in 2009. So I suppose a false dawn only indicates the real one.