I will certainly miss Aertel, or at least I would like to say that. But to be honest, I didn’t even realize it still existed until a few days ago. In fact, I haven’t thought about or used Aertel in over 15 years. Like many people, I assumed it had disappeared along with other outdated technologies like the BBC’s teletext service Ceefax, which shut down in 2012 when analogue broadcasting was phased out.
But no, Aertel was still hanging on, the last teletext service in Europe, despite waning public interest and the unstoppable rise of the internet and digital TV. Although, the days of pressing the text button on the TV remote to access Aertel’s simple, colorful pages against black or blue backgrounds had already become nostalgic before the closure announcement.
In 2019, Aertel was transitioned to a digital platform, serving as nothing more than a gateway to various sections of the RTÉ website. If it weren’t for the legal obligation imposed by the Broadcasting Act of 2009, which required RTÉ to provide a teletext service, Aertel would have likely been shut down much earlier. After the passing of the Online Safety and Media Regulation Act last year, that obligation was lifted.
There has been a fair amount of online mourning over the demise of Aertel, although some of it seems performative, coming from individuals who never actually utilized the service. Their nostalgic declarations resemble those mourning the death of a rock star whose music they never bought. How many life soundtracks does one person need, anyway?
That being said, we can’t underestimate the novelty and excitement of Aertel when it was launched in 1987. Before the internet, 24-hour television, and dedicated news channels, being able to access breaking news, sports results, cinema listings, travel timetables, holiday offers, competitions, classifieds, and even rudimentary games through a television without any additional gadgets or gizmos was truly remarkable. It was a precursor to the internet itself.
Sure, by today’s standards, Aertel pages were painfully slow to load, but back then we didn’t even use the word “load” in that context. Aertel captured the fascination of not only regular folks but also the oulfellas, a disappearing group of men frequently spotted in Dublin pubs. These oulfellas would sit at the bar with a pint in one hand and the racing page of Aertel in the other. If there was no horse racing on TV that day, they no longer needed to rush to the betting shop to find out if their horse won. They could simply ask the barman to put on Aertel and order another pint while they were at it.
Taking a darker spin on nostalgia, one could argue that Aertel’s instant access to information foreshadowed the impact the internet would eventually have on print newspapers. But in a week’s time, Aertel will be no more. It will be added to the scrapheap of other 80s and 90s relics that have either disappeared or fallen out of common use, like VCRs, video rental clubs, floppy disks, telephone boxes, telephone books, waterbeds, Cabbage Patch Dolls, leg warmers, ghetto blasters, answering machines, Filofaxes, paper maps, pocket calculators, and overpriced Dublin restaurants with French names and minuscule portions. While the likelihood of these things making a comeback is slim, considering the revival of the ghastly 80s mullet hairstyle, it’s best to never say never.
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