In The News

Some bloke appears on BBC Breakfast with Ceefax behind him

On Wednesday the 5th of January 2022, Jim Waterson of The Guardian published an article on the NMS Ceefax service - in it he chatted to me about how the service works, why it was re-created and why it's better than many websites available these days.

It's release suddenly brought the service to the eyes of the world's media, and the resulting surge in traffic causing the site to slow to a crawl, eventually crashing under the insane loads.

Many other news outlets picked up the story, some borrowing the story from The Guardian, others taking the time to gather info from the site itself, or get in touch with me directly.

This page is an attempt to find and link to every news article, radio report or TV interview Ceefax is featured in - if you find one that's not in the below list, or has a link missing that you can provide, send it to me at nathanmediaservices@gmail.com!

What's 15 minutes of fame like?

Certainly weird, especially for a reclusive nerd type like me. Overnight my email inbox was filled with journalists from all over wanting permission to use an image, or wanting to chat.

It took me a while to get used to live interviews. I hope there was an improvement obvious once I'd done a few of them - certainly I think that the last handful were the best ones. That's also partly because the final few were less time-constrained - live on a news program you might only have a minute or two at best, whereas the later shows tended to be more chatty - e.g. Newstalk with Sean Moncrieff and Radio 2 with Jeremy Vine.

I'd also had more of a chance to figure out better sounding answers to their common questions. A favourite first question was "Why?" - that's really hard to answer in an interview because the answer could go on for hours... and yet simultaneously, there isn't any answer. "Ack, just for the craic" is not a good answer to give on national radio! The newspaper articles were the best for that, because you had all the time in the world (relatively speaking) to formulate an accurate and well worded response.

I think the most amusing part was the reaction from friends, family and work colleagues. I suddenly had to ask for time off because "erm, I have to be on BBC One in the morning..." - and BBC NI somehow found out where I work and phoned into reception. Still no idea where they got that information from. It stirred up a lot of activity on various group chats - between the teletext group, work group and family group I had lots of messages to read!

The comments under all the news articles and social media posts were interesting as well. I'd say around 90% were very positive - but I found it odd that the 10% that were very not positive were all under Northern Irish articles. Make of that what you will...

I'd like to thank all those involved - from the journalists who had to put up with me stumbling over words and trying to sound vaguely coherent, and my bosses who were very understanding and let me dash off during work hours to give interviews. Also all the folks who sent in emails, commented on social posts, and chatted in online threads.

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