Author: Graeme McMillan

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas, as the song goes. Or, at least, we’ve made it to the part of the year when the decorations can go up and we can start listening to the many, many holiday songs I have in my collection. Either way, it’s a marvelously comforting time of year for me, even if I’m not quite ready to go as far as Andy Williams does when he declares it “the most! Wonderful tiiiiiiiiime of the yeaaaaaar.” (Actually, it may be, although I also feel pretty strongly about fall.)

It’s December, is what I’m saying.

With 2020 being the surreal, difficult experience that it’s been, just the simple fact that we’ve made it here feels almost unlikely in and of itself, to be honest. If it wasn’t for the weather, you could probably convince me that we’re still only midway through the year, the way time has stretched out and felt elastic and meaningless, for one thing; is it really eight months since I found out I was losing my Wired gig? How can that be true? What happened to all the traditional landmarks that happen across the year to remind us that we’re moving forward?

Of course, it’s also been the kind of year that’s underscored how ridiculous the notion of things changing purely because of time moving on actually is; just because we’re in the last month of the year doesn’t really mean anything in the big picture — we will, more than likely, still be living quarantine lives for much of next year, and there’s not even the transition of Presidential power until the end of January. Things aren’t going to significantly shift when we put away the Advent Calendar and the tree.

Yet, bringing those things out, celebrating this time of year and taking part in everything surrounding it, still matters to me, despite the logic and the knowing better. There’s still comfort and security and happiness to be found there, for me, in the music and the decorations and traditions old and new. The holiday season is, at heart, about hope and kindness, and that’s what I find myself focusing on over everything else — a hope that, against logic, perhaps, we can be in a kinder world at least for the next month.

Perhaps it’s because I returned to reading Rian Hughes’ The XX over the weekend, with all its ponderings about the nature of ideas and how infectious information can be — and what it’s actually capable of doing to us, as a result — but I found myself thinking about Teletext for the first time in quite some time recently.

Most people, I’m sure, won’t remember Teletext at all; it’s this strange oddity that will die off when a certain generation does, I suspect, and something that only really is remembered in the same way that certain bands, television commercials, and brands of snack food are, with the nostalgic devotion of the niche fan. (So, of course it’s something that I remember fondly; that description fits me so well, it’s as if it’s a glove I made for myself.)

Teletext was fueled by the same technology that made closed captioned subtitles possible, but instead of simply sending a line or two of dialogue to your television at any one time, it sent entire screens of information, with multiple pages available through keying in specific three-digit numbers and waiting for the correct information to cycle through. Positioned as a transmitted magazine, it was a pre-internet internet, complete with 8-bit graphics and a flavor of snark in its tone that would come to dominate online writing for a decade or more.

There were three “channels” of Teletext in the UK when I was a teenager; the BBC’s was called Ceefax, and I sadly can’t remember what either ITV or Channel 4’s was called; each broadcast network was responsible for its own Teletext content, and each network has its own tone and attitude towards the format.

I was, of course, a fan. I loved that the information was constantly updated and available — it was like a newspaper, but always up to date and always there! — and I loved that it felt infinite, with pages available for seemingly all interests and tastes. Channel 4’s music coverage, in particular, I remember being an essential stepping stone between Smash Hits and Popbitch, two references that likely mean nothing to most and everything to those that recognize them.

Teletext feels like a missing piece of information history today, oddly, and an essential piece of my mental DNA. Who might I have been if I hadn’t been exposed to that? What career might I have discovered without it?

In recent weeks, I’ve become quietly convinced that someone is trying to spam me by signing me up for mailing lists; I’ve had three or four different waves of spam mails just pile up in my inbox, on a quasi-regular basis — always during the recording of the Wait, What? podcast, curiously enough — and I’ve started to get just that little tiny bit paranoid about it.

It could be nothing, of course; it might just be a very strange couple of coincidence and nothing more. But the more I wonder about it, the more I find myself thinking just how wonderfully devious it would be, to do such a thing; how good an untraceable prank, or sneaky a trick, it would be to just sign people up to multiple spam lists and knowing that their inbox would soon be filled with everything from multiple messages from Entertainment Weekly and associated publications — there are so, so many, dear reader — to any number of people offering to take care of legal problems that I most assuredly don’t have. (Also, offering these services to someone whose name isn’t mine, but that’s perhaps beside the point.)

It’s very possible that I’m getting all this spam because my email address has traveled through PR companies or comic book conventions to some mailing list or another, and then been sold onto a third party vendor and beyond; I know that’s happened to other people, and I’ve been around enough to surely be on far too many lists of journalist emails by this point not to get caught up in some kind of a net. There really might be a perfectly innocent — or, at least, not malicious — explanation for the waves of spam messages I’ve gone through.

If there is, though, I’d almost be disappointed. Don’t get me wrong; I hate dealing with the sudden influx of spam and wouldn’t be disappointed if I never had to do that ever again. But, in an entirely perverse way, I like the idea that someone, somewhere, decided that this was the way they wanted to fuck with me, knowing just how low-level frustrating it would turn out to be.