Lovely bit of legacy.
And the limited screen real-estate meant that the writing had to be short, simple and clear. The screen format was 24 x 40 and once headers and footers are taking into account a typical story might have 17 x 40 = 680 characters. Assuming an average English word length of 5 characters that's roughly 110 words. Add in blank lines for paragraph breaks and the format is very constrained.
I'll miss it, I used to watch football scores updating on Teletext for many many years...
And this reminds me of Mikefax on the BBC Micro that could be used to make your own teletext style pages. Control code 141 for double height Mode 7 chars?
Bamboozle was a general knowledge, multiple choice quiz. A hacker at heart I noticed the correct choice (red/green/yellow/blue) went to a different page number to the rest. So if you quickly flicked through all the colours until you found the different one you could blaze through with 100% correct.
My sister was amazed when I could get every question right first time.
Some broadcasters even had "apps" that you could "run" through an assigned Teletext page and your phone (using DTMF), including home banking and silly games.
If you picked up a random page in a certain interval you would actually see anonymized account data being broadcast around...
(also check ETS 300 706 and 708 for more fun stuff about teletext)
