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QPR were playing a then, high-flying Barnsley away, and this bloke became increasingly annoyed at the page scrolling, and having to wait for the QPR game to come round, so he pressed the freeze button the next time the QPR page came around.
90 mins up, 0-0 and he thinks: clean sheet away, not bad. Next day he gets the paper and discovers the actual score wasn't what it was when he froze the page 15 minutes in!
'Always In Motion' by John Honney available on amazon.co.uk
As a young lad old racing home to check the scores one April afternoon, it was indeed Ceefax that broke the news to me Eoin Jess had scored the solitary goal of the game at Coventry to all but send us down. Still remember that page loading...
First memories of Ceefax was the League Cup semi final second leg against Villa at Villa Park. Eldest brother at the time was a transmitter engineer at the Beeb and had managed to ‘procure’ a ceefax box, which you plugged into the back of the TV. To dial a page you had to align the three numbers required a bit like a padlock and then wait for the page to load at the same speed as dial-up was with the internet in the early days. Thought we had lost 2-1 as there was no refresh back then until watching the highlights on Sportsnight.
I worked on Ceefax Sport for a few years in the late 90s.
By far the best job I've ever had - eight hour shifts basically watching live feeds of sport from all over the world that nobody else had access to, which I'd have paid to do back then, let alone get paid for it.
Was quite the skill getting the headlines / reports to fit exactly on the page and on the final whistle, lateness and inaccuracy were not tolerated as so many other places used Ceefax for their info (bookies etc).
I was doing Ceefax for that David Beckham England Greece game when we qualified, that took a lot of fast writing!
I really miss it, was an amazing job. Pages 301, 302, 312, 340 engrained in my mind.
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