Sbectel

~ the goodbye ~

Sbectel was the teletext service of S4C, the Welsh-language television channel, and it was named after a magazine. Sbec was S4C's printed programme guide, which started life as a pull-out inside the TVTimes in the HTV Wales region. So the text pages behind a Welsh television channel took their name from a regional insert in an English listings magazine, which is a fair description of how much of Welsh broadcasting has had to be assembled.

Its page numbers tell the rest of that story. Through the 1980s Sbectel ran in conjunction with ORACLE, the teletext operator on ITV and Channel 4, and lived at pages 410 to 499 inside somebody else's page space. When ORACLE lost the licence in 1993 and Teletext Ltd took over, Sbectel moved to 300 to 399 and came under S4C directly for the first time. Then in 2003 it moved again, to 400 to 499, because Channel 4 had closed its own service, FourText, and launched Teletext on 4 across the numbers Sbectel was using. A Welsh service had its address reassigned twice by decisions taken in London.

What it carried was modest and useful: what was on, and what the programme you were about to watch actually was. The part that mattered most was elsewhere in the numbering. Page 888 held the English subtitles, the standard UK address everyone knew, and page 889 held the Welsh ones. For a channel broadcasting in a language with a few hundred thousand speakers, a subtitle page carries more than accessibility. It is how the programme reaches half the people watching it.

Teletext itself is not foreign territory to me. Turkish television carried its own text pages through the nineties, and the experience of thumbing a three-digit number into a remote and then waiting while the counter cycled through the subpages was identical wherever it existed. What I have no claim on is the Welsh part of it. S4C exists because Gwynfor Evans threatened to starve himself to death in 1980 until the government honored its promise of a Welsh-language channel, and Sbectel was a set of text pages running on top of that.

~ the chronicle ~

~ page 888 ~

The subtitle pages are the reason a teletext service on a minority-language broadcaster is worth a grave at all. Through the analogue years, the text layer was often the only bilingual surface a broadcast had. An English speaker in Cardiff and a Welsh speaker in Caernarfon could watch the same programme off the same transmitter and read it in different languages, using a technology built out of the spare lines at the top of an analogue picture.

That capacity rode along inside signal that was being transmitted anyway, so the marginal cost of carrying a second language was close to nothing.

~ the switchover ~

The end was scheduled rather than decided. Wales was one of the first parts of the UK to go through digital switchover, and the Kilvey Hill transmitter covering most of South West Wales was the first of the eight main Welsh transmitters to complete it. On 9 September 2009 the analogue signal in that area stopped, and Sbectel stopped with it, because a teletext page has nowhere to live once there is no analogue picture to hide inside.

S4C had published a short notice about it in June 2009. That notice is now itself gone: the URL Wikipedia still cites for the closure redirects into nothing on the channel's current domain. The announcement of a dead service outlived the service by less than a decade.

~ after the signal ~

There was a successor of a sort, and it arrived before the thing it succeeded had died. In September 2007 S4C launched a bilingual digital text service on S4C Digidol, available only to Freeview viewers in Wales, so for two years the old service and the new one ran side by side to different audiences on different platforms. After 2009, the official answer was that the listings had partly moved to the S4C and BBC websites.

They had, and they hadn't. A web page takes more than three keypresses from an armchair, and it takes you away from the programme you are watching to get there. Everything teletext did got replaced by something better, except the specific thing it was good at.

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