iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Mailbox! @newmailbox.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

That’s very kind! For me, my own teletext fascination started with late 80s Ceefax, Oracle, and especially 4-Tel which I thought had a particular level of design excellence. Glad to pass the fascination on! 🙂

011

Mailbox! @newmailbox.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

We think Park Avenue might have been the world's first, and possibly only, teletext re-run. (We had also looked into the idea of repeating The Adventures of 4T from 4-Tel, but we couldn't manage the asking price at the time.)

141

Mailbox! @newmailbox.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

Since then, more episodes have been found in teletext recoveries, too, which has brought up the numbers some more. At present 990 episodes exist in some form, out of the total 1445 episodes broadcast. (Although there were a few episode numbers which we believe were skipped for various reasons.)

131

Mailbox! @newmailbox.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

Abandoned? Oh no - we re-ran almost all the episodes that still existed at the time. There were several good continuous runs of story in the printouts (which we re-typed) and we ran them for several years.

A grid of episode numbers indicating which episodes of Park Avenue are known to exist, and which are missing. Individual episodes are highlighted in yellow, with large continuous blocks showing near-complete runs from episodes 250 to 750 and 1034 to 1427.

A dot matrix printout of a single page from the Park Avenue episode #338, broadcast November 3rd 1989. The text reads:

"PAUL, we have to talk?" blurted Sarah. "I really don't think we have anything to discuss," was his curt reply.

"How can you say that? I'm having a baby and it's yours." As soon as she said it, Sarah knew she'd made a mistake for some passing nurses heard her and were talking about her and Paul.

"Stupid!" said Paul. "Now it will be all over the hospital!" He started to rant. "Ever since I met you my life has been in turmoil. You're bad luck. You've Jinxed me!" This reduced Sarah to tears again and she fled to see her friend Lucy.

142

Mailbox! @newmailbox.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

NickText started out running on an ex-Oracle transmission system (originally in the SkyText racks at Sky in Osterley), which later moved to Rathbone Place where Paramount Text used it too. It didn’t have any of the old Oracle pages on it though. 🙂

242

Mailbox! @newmailbox.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

@thetvroom.com @paulbuckle.bsky.social Teletext is a bit of a small world, and my colleague had worked with Oracle in the past. Many of the staff had moved on to other services, and Robbie, the writer of Park Avenue, was working for SkyText at the time.

172

Mailbox! @newmailbox.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

@thetvroom.com “re-live all 5 years of it” was definitely what we had hoped, until a big box of Oracle printouts arrived and it turned out that about half of them were missing! 🙂

120

Mailbox! @newmailbox.bsky.social · 10/06/2026

A couple of weeks after the channel launch, by the look of that. I’d forgotten we separated out calls, faxes and emails at first! Pretty sure we gave that up fairly quickly and combined them all together after a while. 🙂

131

Mailbox! @newmailbox.bsky.social · 23/07/2025

Er, I'm afraid it's no points from me, Bradley. I prefer The Bay City Rollers. They're quite obscure, not many people have heard of them, naturally.

000

Mailbox! @newmailbox.bsky.social · 17/03/2025

A similar event also took place. The webcomic 'Maison Otaku' published the following cartoon some years later:

A screenshot of a web comic, 'Maison Otaku, every monday and friday on aniverse.com' (web link now defunct). One character is placing an order in a restaurant, across the counter from a server.

Customer: "I'll have a chocolate milkshake please, large, hold the barbeque sauce."
Server: "Barbeque sauce?"
Customer: "No! No barbeque sauce!"
Server: "Sir, we don't put barbeque sauce in milkshakes... did your last shake have sauce in it?"
Customer: "No, but only because I told them not to."
Server: "Er... Okay.. Anything else?"
Customer: "Yeah, I'll have a quarter pounder."
Customer: "No ice."

010

Mailbox! @newmailbox.bsky.social · 17/03/2025

Observance of the religious week continues until April 27th (or 'Good Thursday') when we celebrate the joyous testimony:

An image of a teletext page showing an edition of Mailbox from Tuesday 27th April 1999. A reader named 'Scotty Boy' writes in with the following: "After bowling on Friday I went to McDonalds and I asked for a coke with no barbecue sauce. The woman looks at me and says "You don't get barbecue sauce with coke". I said that was OK because I didn't want any. She asked if I wanted anything else, so I said I'd like a milkshake, also with no barbecue sauce. She talks to somebody in the back, who came round and said "You don't get barbecue sauce with drinks". I said "I see". They asked if I wanted anything else. I said I'd have a hamburger. When it arrived, I said "I hope there's no barbecue sauce on that". And I got chucked out!"

120

Mailbox! @newmailbox.bsky.social · 17/03/2025

Early days, probably nobody has found us yet. They will come. By which I mean arrive.

110

Mailbox! @newmailbox.bsky.social · 17/03/2025

Some viewers may not be aware of the yearly religious festival of National No Barbeque Sauce Day, which is of course one week long. It starts annually on April 21st (or the nearest Friday in other years) with the disavowal of barbeque sauce, as seen here in these early texts from 1999:

A teletext page from April 21st 1999. An edition of Mailbox shows a call from a reader named 'Fezza', who says 'BBQ sauce should be available on the NHS'. The editor's reply, written in unnecessary great length to fill the page, reads: "No it should not. BBQ sauce should be banned. It tastes awful and is usually so full of colouring that it permanently stains anything it drips onto. In fact in honour of the menace that is BBQ sauce, I nominate this Friday as "National Mailbox No BBQ Sauce Day". On Friday, in any fast food outlet, suffix your order with "No Barbeque Sauce". Example: "Bigburger with cheese, no barbeque sauce, please". Repeat this even on items which would not normally come with such sauce, just to be sure. Example: "Small diet Cola, no barbeque sauce" Are we agreed?"

173

Reposted by Mailbox!

Mailbox! @newmailbox.bsky.social · 16/03/2025

Sir, the very idea of barbecue sauce is completely wrong and therefore Entirely Against Our Principles, which we simply would not compromise on, until the cheque clears.

102

Reposted by Mailbox!

Dan @danofthewibble.bsky.social · 13/03/2025

Can I have barbecue sauce with your posts?

101

Mailbox! @newmailbox.bsky.social · 16/03/2025

Sir, the very idea of barbecue sauce is completely wrong and therefore Entirely Against Our Principles, which we simply would not compromise on, until the cheque clears.

102

Mailbox! @newmailbox.bsky.social · 13/03/2025

Hello. Thank you for calling Mailbox. Please speak slowly and clearly, remembering to spell any difficult words that you think we might not hear. Especially any names like "Bruce Boxleitner", otherwise we might put "Bruce Bops Whitener" on our teletext pages and just make ourselves look silly.

131