Ceefax, the Vidiprinter and Checking Results Before the Web

For anyone who’s only ever checked a football score on a phone, it’s genuinely hard to picture what Saturday afternoons used to involve for pools players. There was no refresh button. There was a television, a teletext remote, and a specific kind of patience that doesn’t really exist anymore.

The Vidiprinter: Results as They Happened

BBC’s Grandstand, the long-running Saturday sports programme, carried a segment that became a genuine cultural fixture: the vidiprinter. It was, quite literally, a printer — its clattering mechanical typeface feeding results onto the screen letter by letter as they arrived from grounds around the country, usually accompanied by a distinctive printing sound that viewers of a certain age still remember vividly. Scores arrived unevenly and without warning — a half-time score here, a full-time result there — which meant following your own coupon through the vidiprinter was an exercise in constant, slightly nervous attention rather than a single tidy check at the final whistle.

Crucially, the vidiprinter wasn’t really built for pools players specifically — it was a general sports results service — but it became the default way many fans and punters alike found out how an afternoon of fixtures had actually gone, long before any purpose-built results line existed.

Teletext Takes Over the Living Room

From the 1970s onward, teletext services gave viewers another route to the same information, this time self-service rather than broadcast on a schedule. The BBC’s service, Ceefax, and ITV’s equivalent, Oracle, let you punch a page number into the remote and sit through a short pause while the page built itself onto the screen, a line at a time, in that unmistakable low-resolution teletext font. Sport results pages were among the most-used pages on the entire service, particularly on a Saturday evening, and regular players quickly learned the general area of the page index where football results tended to sit.

Why it suited pools players so well

Teletext had one real advantage the vidiprinter didn’t: it was available on demand, repeatedly, without having to wait for a presenter to cross back to the studio. A player checking a coupon against a full set of Saturday results could cycle through a results page as many times as needed, cross-referencing scores against their slip at their own pace rather than catching each result as it scrolled past once.

The Ritual Around Checking

What’s easy to lose in a modern retelling is how much of a shared, almost domestic ritual this was. Checking the pools on a Saturday evening often meant the television staying on a specific channel through the early evening, coupon in hand, sometimes with family members taking turns calling out scores as the teletext pages cycled or the vidiprinter clattered through its list. It wasn’t a quick task — it was a small, recurring part of the weekend, structured entirely around broadcast schedules rather than personal convenience.

Patience as part of the product

That structure meant anticipation was built into the experience in a way that’s almost impossible to recreate now. A coupon’s fate wasn’t confirmed in seconds; it unfolded gradually across an afternoon and evening, which arguably made the whole exercise feel more like an event and less like a transaction.

Phone Lines and the Early Alternative to Teletext

Teletext and the vidiprinter weren’t the only routes available, especially before teletext became universal in British homes through the later 1970s and 1980s. Dedicated results telephone lines, often run by pools companies or newspapers, let callers dial in and listen to a recorded or live-read set of scores — useful for anyone without a television nearby, but far more laborious than glancing at a screen, since you generally had to listen through an entire read-out to catch the handful of results actually relevant to your coupon. These lines also tended to charge at premium rates once that model became more common later on, adding a small but real cost to the ritual of checking your own results that modern instant notifications have made entirely obsolete.

Sunday newspapers as the final backstop

For anyone who missed both the broadcast and the phone line, Sunday newspapers printed full results tables that served as the last, most reliable backstop — though by the time Sunday’s paper landed on the doorstep, most serious pools players had long since found out their coupon’s fate one way or another the evening before. The newspaper check was less about discovery and more about confirmation, a final, printed record to set against whatever you’d already seen flash past on a teletext page or heard crackle through the vidiprinter the previous day.

The Transitional Years: Teletext Meets Early Internet

Through the 1990s, a genuinely odd transitional period existed where some households had both teletext and an early, dial-up internet connection, and the two coexisted awkwardly rather than one immediately replacing the other. Dial-up speeds and per-minute connection charges meant the internet wasn’t automatically the quicker or cheaper option for a quick results check, and plenty of households kept reaching for the teletext remote out of habit and practicality well after online alternatives technically existed. It took the combination of broadband becoming standard and, later, mobile data becoming genuinely fast and cheap before teletext’s advantages as an instant, no-connection-required option were finally and fully overtaken.

What Changed, and What Didn’t

The move to online results, and eventually to instant mobile notifications, removed almost all of that friction — which is obviously more convenient, but it’s worth recognising what got lost along with it. The underlying appeal of the pools hasn’t changed: picking your selections, waiting through an afternoon of football, and finding out how close you got. Only the mechanics of that last step have been transformed, from a shared broadcast ritual into something private and instant.

• The vidiprinter delivered results live but unevenly, as they came in from grounds.
• Ceefax and Oracle gave viewers a repeatable, self-service results page.
• Checking a coupon was a scheduled, often shared household activity, not an instant lookup.
• The core pools experience — selection, wait, result — has survived every change in the technology around it.

Whether you’re checking results on an app today or simply enjoy the history of how it used to work, the pools remain a form of gambling and should be treated that way: set a budget before you play, enjoy it as entertainment rather than a plan to win back losses, and remember it’s for over-18s only. If it stops being fun, support is available through services such as BeGambleAware.