The Slow-Loading Wonder That Ran Our Lives
If you grew up in Ireland in the 1990s, there was a very specific kind of patience required of you. Not the patience of waiting for Christmas morning, or for the credits to roll on a VHS rewind. No, this was a deeper, more meditative patience — the patience of sitting in front of the television, remote control in hand, watching Teletext cycle through its pages at the speed of a particularly relaxed snail.
And yet, we loved it. Every single one of us.
Pages, Pages, Glorious Pages
For those who need reminding, Teletext was a broadcasting service that transmitted text and basic graphics alongside your regular TV signal. On RTÉ, it went by the brilliant name Aertel, and it was essentially Ireland’s internet before the internet existed. You accessed it by hitting the TEXT button on your remote, and suddenly you were transported into a pixelated world of cyan, magenta, and yellow blocks that somehow felt impossibly futuristic.
Page 302 was the weather. That was sacred ground. Before heading to a match in Croker or a Sunday spin to the seaside, Dad would plant himself in front of Aertel’s weather page with the same gravity a ship’s captain might consult the stars. It didn’t matter that the forecast was often wildly optimistic. The ritual was everything.
The News, The Sport, The Subtitles
Aertel carried news headlines, sports results, TV listings, and even subtitles for hard-of-hearing viewers — genuinely groundbreaking stuff for its era. Checking the Lotto numbers on a Saturday night via Teletext was practically a national ceremony. You’d key in the page number with trembling fingers, wait for it to load, and squint at the blocky digits with the desperate hope of a changed life.
The sports pages were essential on a Monday morning before school. League of Ireland results, GAA scores, English First Division tables — all rendered in gorgeous lo-fi graphics. It wasn’t pretty, but it was yours. You felt like you were hacking into something secret and powerful just by pressing three numbers on a remote.
The Art of the Teletext Wait
What people forget is the waiting. Teletext cycled through its pages continuously, meaning if you missed page 157, you had to wait for it to come around again. Sometimes this took thirty seconds. Sometimes it felt like three years. You’d sit there, watching unrelated pages scroll past — holiday deals, classified ads, a recipe for beef stew — with a sort of zen acceptance that modern broadband has completely stolen from us.
Why We Still Miss It
There’s something genuinely comforting about the memory of Teletext. It represents a slower, quieter relationship with information. Nobody was doomscrolling through Aertel at 2am. Nobody was getting into arguments on page 447. You checked what you needed, you waited patiently for it, and then you got on with your evening.
In an age of instant everything, that blocky, pixelated, lovably clunky service feels almost radical in its simplicity. Aertel finally went dark in 2009, but for anyone who grew up pressing that TEXT button on a rainy Irish afternoon, it never really switched off.
Some pages just stay with you forever.
