This coming Monday is the 50th anniversary of the launch of BBC Ceefax. There’s a reunion in London which I am thrilled to be attending but of course as good as it’s going to be, it can only have a small snapshot of the hundreds or quite possible thousands of people who worked on this teletext news service.

Ceefax was deeply important to me — it’s the first reason I got to work at BBC Television Centre — and yet it simultaneously feels so long ago. The service finally went off air in 2012, so it is a while back, and I must’ve stopped regularly working for it ten years before that.

But this ancient history feeling is really that Ceefax and all teletext services just look rather prehistoric. It’s usually quite hard to even find examples of Ceefax pages, but in this case, look up. That’s a screengrab of my very last page from when I did weekly shifts. It says I did 15,000 pages and I know by the time I really stopped doing anything it was 16,000, so there was a little patch where I was writing stuff remotely, but that was the last one I did in Television Centre.

Oh! Grief, this has just this instant — I mean this instant, writing to you – snapped back into my head. I was dropped for budget reasons and my last editor there assumed that my TV previewing and reviewing pages could be easily replaced by just assigning shows to the remaining staff. But I’m a drama nut, I watched everything, I would so excitedly go every week to the TV Previews department — head through the scenery dock at the back of TVC, turn right at the TARDIS prop, then up the stairs — and I would spend ten hours or more a week on this.

No one left wanted to spend ten hours on it.

I can’t remember what they did, I presume the previews and reviews continued, but I have to imagine they were scaled down. I doubt it made a giant difference, but I don’t know.

What I do know is that I would describe myself as the least of Ceefax people. I worked there for just about a sixth of its lifetime, and I was always also on Radio Times or BBC News Online.

But on Monday, news permitting, I will be on BBC Five Live enthusing about Ceefax and its anniversary. I love that it is being remembered, I so love that, and it is an absolute delight that out of everyone who could be asked, it’s me. I get to do this, I get to beam about a news service and a time that will forever be extraordinarily important to me.

I just can’t get over how incredibly long ago it seems now.