Through a lens

If you happen to remember BBC Ceefax, you’ll know that it had pages of news that you selected and read on your TV set. What you will have no reason to know is there were two sets of these pages, and at midnight the system switched from one to the other. It was so that you could set up the pages for tomorrow and they would go live on time, unless you did something disastrously wrong. Disaster was possible because switching to the new set meant switching away from the old. So one of the jobs on the late shift at BBC Television Centre was to copy over all the old pages to the new set in order for there to be uninterrupted coverage. I don’t want to think about how many decades ago this was now, but on two different late shifts there, I forgot. From midnight until whenever the early team started, there were so very many blank pages in Ceefax’s entertainment section. I write this to you and I can feel my legs giving way under me. I can picture the newsroom as I cheerily strode in the next…