Gallery (4-Tel)
To encourage audience participation, Channel 4’s 4-Tel service instituted Gallery, featuring viewers’ hand-drawn art. The service would send out a pack of felt-tip pens and teletext page grids for people to design with, and employees would interpret the results as best they could for a teletext graphic.
Mort Smith, who worked with their teletext provider Intelfax, remembers they had “literally thousands of people writing in and sending [them] stuff.”
“It’s about one-to-one. Suddenly you’re inviting people to deliver something to the television company which is going to go on air and people can say, “look, I did that,” and you know, get Auntie Bessie round and Uncle Fred and say “that’s my teletext graphic on there,” and that was fantastic.”
–Mort Smith
One of these viewer-submitted graphics, a monochrome Donald Duck, was featured in a mini-documentary broadcast on Channel 4 around 1985. Mort Smith, being interviewed for the film, stated, “We obviously know what teletext graphics can do, but we’re trying to get that message over to people by getting the public themselves to design teletext graphic pages.”
Regarding the service’s user interface, he added that the Intelfax office spent considerable time ensuring that their output was visually appealing, as they were “asking viewers to do something that they’re not actually used to doing, which is reading their television sets.” For that reason, he said, it had to be made as easy as possible for them, adding that he had always felt there “should be more thought given to the way teletext is presented in the home.”
Frame-It
Frame-it was a feature on Teletext Ltd’s Kids section that began in the 1990s, following in the footsteps of 4-Tel’s Gallery by translating viewers’ drawings to teletext. The main difference here was that artworks were created and submitted without the use of a teletext grid, so designers would remake them freehand.
According to Teletext Graphic Designer Paul Rose, none of the Frame-its were ever “made up” by him, and they were “always genuine pictures that kids had drawn in.”
Sources
- Teletext People: Mort Smith Ceefax, Intelfax 4-Tel, 3 November 2022
- Mini documentary about teletext and subtitling in the 1980s, c. 1985
- Teletext Fest 2016 – Artists Panel with Paul Rose and Steve Horsley, teletextart.co.uk, 9 October 2016
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