I have 2000 old VHS tapes in my garage and I don't know what to do with them
tl;dr: I have approximately 2000 VHS tapes containing off-air recordings of British TV in the last 90s and early 2000s in my garage. If you work for, or are connected with an archive that might be interested in taking them and saving the contents for posterity, I would love to talk to you. Please get in touch!
This week marks the 50th anniversary of a major technological milestone: The advent of teletext services in the UK, with the launch of Ceefax on the BBC 1 .
Until the mainstream adoption of the internet two decades later, teletext was an incredibly important source of news and information. Tens of millions of people used it on their TV every week – far more than read any newspapers or magazines at the time.
And in an era when papers only contained yesterday’s news and TV bulletins were just 30 minutes long, a few times a day, it was the closest thing we had to real time news.
I used to spend hours every week reading teletext. I grew up on the cusp of the internet era – but I remember how every night, with wifi not yet a thing, that I would scroll through virtually every page of Ceefax on the BBC, and Teletext on ITV and Channel 4, reading the news, the editorial features and even the proto-message-boards, in the form of Ceefax’s Backchat and Chatterbox pages.
