Tales From My Youth 4

Hello again,

A few words tonight for Mailbox, the legendary teletext service that following transition to the internet seems to have ground to stop.

Paramount Text (P-Text)'s Mailbox was the vision of the Paramount Channel's in-house teletext production staff for a 'letters page' for the channels innovative teletext service. This was more interactive than a classical letters page, as it took messages from letters, faxes, answer-phone messages and the new medium of emails...and tried to print and reply to as many as possible. Submissions ranged from questions on programme scheduling to guitar chords, and detailed technical data about satellite receivers to surreal mental pictures.

(I was lucky to have a message printed on Mailbox in 1996.)

Mailbox exploded in popularity, with occasionally over one hundred pages of comments per night. There were some tongue in cheek campaigns, like to propel Chage and Aska's 'Castles In The Air' into the charts. Regular contributors were revered, and some even had their own sections - Odo's Sci Fi news, for example. "Ed", "24 Hours" and "48 Hours" were the teletext forerunners to the blog. P-Text even 'repeated' Park Lane, the Oracle teletext soap opera. It is possible that the first email to a teletext service in the UK was published by P-Text. The non channel related service was mirrored online from 1998 onwards (I think). 

As Paramount Comedy Channel (as it became) had less requirement to provide a teletext service, Mailbox ceased on broadcast but continued online (www.newmailbox.co.uk), when updates would be available either online or delivered in mail format.

I checked back in recently, and it hasn't been updated since last July.