Park Avenue

~ the eulogy ~

Teletext rode inside the television signal, in the blank lines above the picture, so the pages on offer to you were whichever ones your own country's broadcasters had chosen to put up there. ORACLE held the teletext contract for British commercial television. Reading Park Avenue therefore meant a British television with the decoder built into it, plus the habit of typing 126 at a fixed hour of the afternoon, and none of that was portable. A page cannot be exported.

What was on it, from Thursday 1 December 1988, was a soap opera. A new episode of Park Avenue went up at five in the afternoon, every day of the week including weekends, usually six to ten pages long, about the people living on a street in Parkfield, a fictional town the writer placed somewhere near London and declined to pin down further. It was written by Robbie Burns. Page 126 also carried a synopsis of recent storylines so anyone who had missed a day could catch up, occasional profiles that listed characters by age and occupation, and, between pages seven and eight, a portrait of one of them drawn in teletext block graphics.

It behaved like a real soap, which is the part that surprises people. There were affairs and dodgy business dealings, and at least one car explosion. It also chased the news: a retired character called Ivy stopped buying beef during the 1990 BSE scare, and when the Strangeways riot set off copycat prison riots across Britain that spring, Parkfield Prison had one too, with the editor of the local paper somehow acting as hostage negotiator.

~ the dossier ~

~ the phone votes ~

Readers were pulled into it in ways that look modern and were in fact just a phone line. ORACLE occasionally let the audience vote on where a storyline should go, and the surviving example is a wine bar owner called Angela deciding whether to accept a proposal from a younger actor she had been seeing for four weeks. The vote came back 63 percent in favor of yes. There was at least one competition inviting readers to send in ideas for new characters.

You could also take it off the screen. Printouts of episodes were sold at roughly seven for £2, and an address was published where a stamped addressed envelope got you a leaflet listing the characters and their birthdays. There were no repeats and no catch-up service of any kind, so a printout was the only way anyone could keep an episode.

~ the move to page 566 ~

ORACLE reshuffled its pages in 1991 and Park Avenue moved onto Channel 4's pages at 566, dropping to six days a week, Monday to Saturday. Nothing about the writing changed. The town carried on, and what the move cost readers was a different page number and the Sunday episode.

~ the last episode ~

ORACLE lost the franchise. From 1 January 1993 British commercial teletext belonged to a different company, and everything ORACLE had made stopped on 31 December 1992. The final episode of Park Avenue went up on 30 December, and it was set on New Year's Eve, the night the service itself would end.

The residents are at a party. Dave, the newspaper editor who had negotiated the prison siege two years earlier, gathers everyone together to announce that he has written a soap opera about all of their lives, that he has called it Park Avenue, and that it is going to be published on teletext. The closing line of 1,445 episodes belongs to Cathall Murphy, a character whose teletext portrait is genuinely frightening to look at, and it is: "Well, bugger me."

Paramount's teletext service repeated it in 1995 on a schedule rigged so the dates in the story matched the dates on your calendar, switching to episode 376 on 11 December so that 11 December in Parkfield fell on 11 December for the reader, and got through 700 episodes that way. Teletext Ltd had a brief go at something similar in the early 2000s with a strip about a plumber and an It girl, and it did not last. Thirty-four years later Park Avenue is still the only daily soap opera Britain has ever published as text.

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