OF ALL THE glittering riches of the internet, few are as counterintuitive as Aertel on the web. With its obese pixels and bald text and its limited palette on a black background, it sits on rte.ieoblivious to the funfair of facts, pictures and film crowded around it. It was made for TV, but is a proto-web somehow clinging on as technology evolves. Reading it online is like dissecting a butterfly to find the caterpillar still wriggling inside.
According to RTÉ, Aertel on the web gets 5.9 million page impressions a month. Presumably, not all of them can be people exclaiming that they can’t believe Aertel is on the web.
Then again, RTÉ has great faith in its text service, which it says had 750,000 users last year. In fact, it has trumpeted the souped-up version that accompanies its Saorview package, although that’s really just adding a bit of carrot to the thin soup of its digital offering.
Nevertheless, Aertel remains a fixture of RTÉ, 25 years after its launch as an “electronic newspaper” and long after we began reading proper electronic newspapers. More than that, it remains in place on Irish television even as so many other television stations are dropping theirs.
Most notable is the BBC’s decision to end Ceefax, the original of the species. That recent news kicked off a flurry of nostalgia pieces. Most mourners mentioned the particular suspense of watching sport on Ceefax – they used to update snooker scores mid-game, break by break – or the simple, pixel-sneezed weather maps, which were almost unrecognisable as any particular country. Cleverly, the BBC’s website included one written in the form of Ceefax, with only three paragraphs per page, across seven of them. It was both a homage and a reminder of how awkward the system is.
Anyway, if the British miss it so much they can always check out Aertel – or the variety of other TV text services viewable online, where you can access the dwindling number, largely confined to European television stations. But they won’t do this, not just because reading Slovenian teletext would mark some kind of time-wasting nadir but also because teletext is redundant as anything other than a dusty file in the nostalgia bank. It is the cassette tape; the TV aerial. It works, but the new technology works better.
And yet I admit that almost every time I sit down to watch television for longer than a few minutes I will press that text button, glance at the headlines, check out the sport. Or, in the case of Channel 4 and ITV, press the button and get a reminder that they have discontinued their services, because they are no longer the commercial bonus that RTÉ believes them to be.
Teletext has always encouraged habitual use and information gluttony. It wasn’t the forerunner of information multitasking – picking up a newspaper while listening to the radio was there long before it – but it ascended to a level that proved an early sign of things to come.
It had that novel function that allowed you to either split the screen or to read the text imposed over the programme you were watching. This was a novelty given that it was launched here in 1987, just two years after the release of Microsoft Windows. But it was the beginnings of that now familiar sitting-room sight of a family punching buttons, flicking through pages, craving updated information while half engaged with the pictures on a TV, half with streaming text.
Now it’s a vestigial technology whose previous usefulness won’t see it survive. What must younger viewers make of it? Do they occasionally sit on the remote control only to bring up this hieroglyphic throwback from another era, and do they wonder just what class of information famine their parents grew up in that this was considered cutting edge?
As it is, there are children’s pages on Aertel. What 21st-century child could possibly consider it satisfying entertainment? In the 1980s, all it had to do was satisfy a generation fresh from being genuinely awestruck by Pong. Aertel includes a birthday page for kids, but last Wednesday, the first of the birthday boys was celebrating his 35th.
Still, as teletext shuts down elsewhere, Aertel hangs on in there. Turning its pages. Slowly. And someday, not far in the future, it will finally disappear, its only remnants perhaps being a mysterious aphorism the old folks say: a watched Aertel page never turns.
Twitter: @shanehegarty
