![]() As soon as I started to get feedback I realized I loved doing this as much as people loved looking at it. So when I started up with creating Teletext art I decided to stick with that feeling of nostalgia and work on mainly pop culture images. What has amazed me is the fan following of teletext in the UK and around the world, it’s so nostalgic for so many people and I think they love the colours, it makes people happy. What inspired me to try to develop teletext graphics to an art form was the fact I was now doing it for fun and it wasn’t a job anymore, no more horses and palm trees. The first time I opened up the blank page and started editing, it felt like I’d never been away, it’ll came back naturally to me. Luckily I found out from Mr Biffo that there was a perfect Teletext editor that had been written by an amazingly talented programmer named Simon Rawles, Simon had created this from the original specification after a conversation with The software is called edit.TF and it is so close to what I remember, but it’s freely available and runs in a web browser. When I used to work for teletext the software was incredibly expensive and to use it at home you had to plug a “dongle” into the back of your PC which would act as a license, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to pay for that just do teletext again. My other concern was I didn’t know if the software or any so for existed to even do teletext work again. Then I started to panic as I realised I had not worked on a teletext image for almost twenty years, and I wasn’t even sure I was able to do it as it had been such a long time. But at the time of organising Dan and Carl didn’t know who I was until Mr Biffo asked if I wanted to join him on the artists panel with him, and as I was having a rough time at work I saw it as a great opportunity for a fun weekend, so I couldn’t say no. How I got back into Teletext was down to Digitiser again! In 2016, the brilliant and created an event to celebrate all things Teletext and Digitiser called “Digifest”, this brought together a whole group of ex-teletext and Ceefax employees as well as celebrity fans for a weekend of panels and shows, and if it had not been for this I’d probably not have ever got into it again. But I was really lucky to fall into it Teletext, I just wish I had appreciated it more at the time. ![]() ![]() Teletext art was never my chosen field, I loved drawing and painting, had a few commissions in the past for artwork and comic books, but even that slipped away as I had to get a proper job. When did you decide you wanted to create art in the format? What inspired you? Had you already been creating character-set based art elsewhere, or was this your first foray into it? Were you already artistic or did teletext bring out creativity that you hadn’t experienced before? Within 4 years I had moved on to website design and IT development and Teletext became a thing of the past for me and eventually the service was closed down in the mid 2000s. I really enjoyed it to start with but eventually working at Teletext pretty much resulted in me swapping horses for palm trees, planes and boats for the holiday advertisers. ![]() My best friend, known in UK gaming journalism as Mr Biffo was working there as the designer, he had recently co-created the cult gaming section called “Digitiser”, this had become a smash hit and was actually the most popular section on Teletext, so this was taking all his time it gave me a foot in the door to join to take over his graphic duty (which was lucky for me as the National Lottery had just been launched and Ladbrokes cut my job as they had lost a huge amount of income). My job was to produce images relating to logos, deals and offers for various sporting events, but mainly it was making pictures of horses and footballs.įrom there I went to work at Teletext, they had recently won the contract to take over from Oracle as the UK’s commercial teletext provider. The first time I used a teletext system to produce images was with the betting shop chain Ladbrokes in around 1995, their system was slightly more advanced that traditional teletext as it was just being broadcast to their chain of stores, and as they had limited pages they could display more data. Thanks for agreeing to answer our questions! When did you first encounter teletext? What system was it? What did you think of it, and what did you use it for? Paleotronic had a chat with prolific teletext artist Steve Horsley, aka Horsenburger, about how and why he got into teletext art.
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