....and so we say farewell..

.....to yet another `service` on which so many have relied for so many years.  This time it`s the BBC (of course) who have decided to switch off the news and sport text services on the TV red button at the end of January next year.   This has been an invaluable service for reading headlines, updated cricket and football scores and tables, weather, travel news and loads more ever since it was first introduced as Ceefax, then Teletext and more latterly Red Button.

In a statement, the BBC said, "It`s always a difficult decision to reduce services but we have to balance the resources needed to maintain and develop this service with the need to update our systems to give people even better internet-based services.  Viewers can still access this information on the BBC website, BBC News and Sport apps as well as our 24-hour News Channel."

No they won`t.  Not if, like me, you are an octogenarian pensioner struggling to survive on a fixed income or someone who has no internet access or no idea how to access the BBC apps (which I take to mean applications) on a mobile phone which you may not have anyway.

Quite apart from the BBC`s assumption that everyone, yes everyone, has a smart phone, PC, tablet or whatever else and - even if they do - will have the ability to master modern technology, I suspect the real reason for this apparently vindictive withdrawal of a very useful service is to dish out some payback for the uncertainty surrounding the fact that the free TV licences for the over-75s  are likely to be withdrawn next year too.

So, farewell to my red buttoning for things like traffic updates, cricket and football  scores and tables and the football gossip column which gives me probably fake news about the comings and goings in the parallel universe of football.  It is a service which will be much missed but then we do indeed live in a mad world of strange priorities.