What Modern British TV Is Missing (And Why It Matters)

Ceefax vs Doomscrolling

Television doesn’t age, it sheds its skin. One generation watches, the next barely recognises it. I’ve said before that British television isn’t better or worse than it used to be, it’s merely different. But every generation insists something vital has gone missing, some elusive texture which made it feel fuller, more alive.

I’ll defend the quality of modern British television until the cows come home, but even I have to concede that certain qualities have fallen by the wayside as it’s marched through the 21st century.

Dare I say it, British television used to feel like a trusted friend, sitting reliably in the corner of the front room as life unfolded around it. Gradually, these elements were stripped away, almost without us noticing. Here are five of these missing idiosyncrasies that have quietly slipped away.

1. Teletext: Information at Your Fingertips

Before smartphones hijacked our every idle second, there was Teletext. Blocky, basic and limited in colour, it beamed an entire universe of news, sport, games, pop star gossip and, most famously, holiday bookings into our front rooms at the press of a button.

It was the internet decades before Google. And I loved it. Hours slipped by playing Bamboozle!, flicking through news flashes and laughing myself silly at the surreal genius of Digitiser. Far too much of my teenage years were spent exploring this 8-bit playground, but I don’t regret a second of it.

It wasn’t fast. Anyone who spent a Saturday afternoon waiting for the football scores to cycle around knows this. Teletext demanded patient curiosity. You couldn’t doomscroll; you dipped in and lingered. Its limitations were obvious, but that was the point.

It also possessed a zen-like calm, a communal noticeboard with not a flamewar in sight. Now, of course, information is instant, visually sharp and aggressively personalised. We’ve gained spectacle and speed, but we’ve lost our understanding that knowledge can arrive gently, one pixel at a time.

2. The Human Glue of In-Vision Continuity Announcers

We’ve already seen Britain’s first AI presenter on Channel 4. A stunt, yes, but also the next natural step in cost-cutting. And what makes even more ‘sense’ in this age of cheap deception? That’s right: AI continuity announcers.

They don’t exist yet, but they can’t be far off. Hidden from view, all they need is a voice, effortlessly generated in 2026. But before all this Skynet nonsense, we had in-vision continuity announcers.

Television used to flow rather than cut. At its heart were in-vision continuity announcers. Real people, on screen, usually in a hastily thrown together set, where a cheese plant was often the most exciting visual element. Here, they would guide us through the evening with a mixture of warmth, authority, and always teetering on the edge of chaos.

Philip Elsmore, Annie St John, Margaret Pritchard and Charles Foster all introduced programmes, apologised for technical hiccups (often of their own doing) and occasionally mentioned the weather. They were mostly seen on ITV, occasionally Channel 4 and, very rarely, the BBC.

Most importantly, they made British television feel alive and flicker with personality. They’ve been gone for decades now and, yes, the joins between programmes are slicker and swifter. But they’re so frictionless that television feels less human.

3. A Patchwork Quilt of Regional Identities

British television used to be steeped in regional pride. The BBC and ITV weren’t singular, all-encompassing entities but a collection of local identities, each with its own accents, regional mascots, priorities and, most importantly, programming.

Regional programming still exists, of course, but - local news aside - it feels more like an obligation, a banner under which costs are neatly accounted for. But just a few decades ago, you had genuinely different schedules across the country.

BBC One might, for example, have been showing a documentary series on swimming to most of the country, but in Scotland they were beaming out Mag is Mog, a Gaelic puppet show so strange that “absurd” feels like polite understatement.

These programmes reflected specific communities and were made by people who actually lived in them. Even the presentation varied wildly, with different idents, announcers and, every so often, different franchise holders, as in 1992 when Thames Television was replaced by Meridian - condemning Rainbow to its grave.

What you watched on television genuinely differed depending on where you were in the country. And, from the accents alone, it was impossible to have any doubt as to where you were watching. Now that regional texture has thinned out, everything feels less intimate, more like a single product designed to look the same from every angle.

And it’s a shame it’s gone. Television stopped feeling like it was made by people who lived round the corner and started feeling like it was made for everyone and no one in particular.

4. Event Television and Shared Viewing

Watching television used to demand time and commitment. You couldn’t summon up the latest episode of EastEnders at the press of a button, you had to be there when it aired. Television worked on an appointment basis. Miss your slot and tough luck, or wrestle with your video recorder in advance and hope it didn’t let you down.

Families gathered around the same set at the same time, and the next day the whole country seemed to be talking about what had been on. At my school, failing to keep up with the latest Red Dwarf episode could leave you in social purgatory.

Today, streaming has shattered that shared rhythm. You might binge the whole of Small Prophets in an evening, while your colleague spreads it over the space of a week and your best friend might not even glance at it for several months, if at all. Convenience has fragmented our viewing so effectively that the collective conversation around television has all but gone.

Big national moments can still pull us together, as future World Cups will prove. The same was true of Boris Johnson’s Covid briefings which regularly hit over 20 million viewers. But these are exceptions now. They feel very different from the genuine magic of the 1996 Only Fools and Horses Christmas trilogy, watched by 24 million viewers who all seemed to be talking about it the next day.

We gained the freedom to watch whatever we wanted, whenever we wanted, but without anyone to share it with.

5. Late Night Oddities

If there was ever a time when British television dared to be truly strange, it was after dark. Late at night, when the majority of the country was asleep, Channel 4 and ITV loosened their rules and created a playground for oddities, a space where anything could appear.

Watching Channel 4 at 1am, you might catch Vids, a cult programme reviewing new video releases, anchored by the calm Scottish Stef Gardiner and the manic, peroxide Welshman Nigel Buckland. Over on ITV, there was Get Stuffed, a low-budget cookery show for students scraping by. And if you were in London in the 1980s, you could glimpse Sit Up & Listen, a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it show featuring Brian Blessed reading poetry before the channel signed off for the night.

At this hour, there was no pressure for the broadcasters to target a mass audience. They could experiment, get peculiar and take risks. No one was going to write into the TV Times and complain about Dick’s Bar, a short lived cocktail show with a woozy, ethereal edge. Some of these programmes appeared fleetingly, but others gathered cult audiences of insomniacs and night owls.

When I had the time to stay up late, I’d scan the listings for anything curious in the wee hours. Occasionally, I stumbled across a gem like Vids, a programme I remember fondly more than 25 years later. Other times, I found anime which left me confused and scrambling for bed. But this was all part of the fun, the thrill of the unexpected never hit harder than at 2am.

Modern television has less patience for this late night eccentricity. Schedules are tidier, safer and filled with repeats. The oddities still exist, mostly on YouTube, but it’s not the same as stumbling across a hidden gem at 3am. Discovery is now effortless and the element of surprise is rare.

What vanished after midnight wasn’t just odd little programmes - it was the permission to be gloriously strange when no one important was watching.

Final Thoughts

I’m well aware that I come across as a man shaking his fist at the modern world, and I’m equally aware that none of these missing elements will ever return. It’s simply not practical.

But this isn’t mere nostalgia. It’s a recognition that progress, for all its efficiency and convenience, isn’t always in the best interests of art and community. Television now bows down to budgets, focus groups and misguided executives rather than indulging in curiosity or delight.

I miss all of these vanished quirks, but the memories remain, proof that British television was a more intriguing beast.

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