Ceefax is BBC Television's name for their text information service, and Ceefax page 102 is a headline summary of the news. What follows are 100% genuine examples of Ceefax news stories. They have been accurately transcribed, and appear here exactly as they did on the screen (trust me).

7.11.00 No deadline has been set for when the timetables will not be published.A strong contender for the least news-worthy headline in history. From an equally banal non-story about delays in publishing the new train timetables. As anyone in Britain knows, railway inefficiency is emphatically not news.

9.11.00 Picasso goes for £39m at US auction. Strange, I thought he was dead.

10.11.00 Bleeding warning for aspirin remedy. Well, perhaps these warnings are a shade tiresome, but it's still rather intemperate language for the BBC, don't ya think?

20.11.00 New rail times "subject to change". You don't say!

20.11.00 Death of woman linked with shooting. Yes, well, one would suspect it might be. How do you do it, Sherlock?

23.11.00 Retired doctors can now face probes. Ooh, could be painful. (Or maybe it's a discarded "Dr. Who" plot outline.)

23.11.00 World's smallest ad fitted on to bee. I'm including this just because I liked it. The story was exactly as stated - scientists had written an advert on a bee. A Nobel prize surely beckons. Why waste time trying to find a cure for cancer, eh?

11.12.00 Govt. unveils global poverty policy. This is the objective? Suddenly, it all makes sense...

12.12.00 Clowns sent into the power station. Almost true, if we allow for a little journalistic desperation. The actual story involved a new plan for the disused Battersea power station which involved, among many other things, a possible circus attraction. (Note for foreigners: Battersea power station is Europe's largest standing collection of crumbling brickwork, and stars on the cover of Pink Floyd's 'Animals' album. It has been disused for over a decade, but some bureaucratic twit 'listed' it so they can't knock it down. Every few years, some big company announces new plans for the building, usually a 'leisure complex plus offices' kind of deal, and they have their top brass photographed in front of it with a grinning MP (typically holding a trowel). Then they fail to get the investment they need, or the money runs out, and the plan goes down the tubes. This happens as a matter of routine. Meanwhile, the vast hulk of a building carries on crumbling and we have thousand of homeless people on the streets. Welcome to Britain.)

14.12.00 US spy Pope freed from Russian jail. I do like this one, because a "spy Pope" sounds like such a brilliant new espionage device... "it not only photographs the secret documents, it blesses them too!" What next? A Stealth Vicar? The actual story is much more dull. There's some American guy named Pope. He's a spy. He's free from jail. Yawn.

8.1.01 Mother who bit off testicle jailed. One can only wonder how this crime came to be perpetrated. Also, a somewhat tricky one for those whose motto is "let the punishment fit the crime".

8.1.01 Film star held funeral for buffalo. A perfectly accurate summary, as it turns out. A famous Thai actor was paying homage to a 32 year old buffalo which starred in his most successful film. The story continued, "Tomorrow, a Thai opera will perform in front of the corpse, which has been hung upright, to pay respect to it."

10.1.01 Extradited murder accused in court. 

28.1.01 House gutted after dog bites aerosol.

5.2.01 Armpit advert complaints over-ruled. Who on earth was advertising armpits?

6.2.01 Halitosis Hell of rancid robot rex. Doubtless winner of the Ceefax office prize for alluring alliteration. (The Natural History Museum built a new robot T.Rex and the engineers gave it smelly breath for authenticity, apparently.)

29.3.01 Heseltine wife sent obscene letters. Bet this got a few libel lawyers salivating. Turns out that the good lady received the letters, rather than sending them. And why "Heseltine wife"? Why not "Mrs. Heseltine"? (Note for foreigners: story refers to the wife of Michael Heseltine, a well-known politician).

20.3.01 Dead man wins unfair sacking claim. So, er, he gets his job back?

13.4.01 Studies blame man for ocean warming. At last! The phantom ocean-warmer is named and shamed!! Actually, just another inconclusive academic re-hash of the 'global warming' debate deciding that mankind is to blame.

3.5.01 Drugged baboon terrorises aeroplane. Perfectly accurate summary about a dodgy zoo deal. Seems this guy had smuggled six baboons on to a plane intending to sell them to a zoo, but the tranquilisers wore off. The story said he smuggled the baboons on board as "hand luggage". Rather infuriatingly, it didn't say HOW.

15.6.01 Rise in legal drug-drive accidents. Legal accidents! A glittering gem of not-what-I-meant writing.

20.6.01 Woman admits microwaving family cat. I don't normally reproduce the whole story, but this one defies belief: "A mother-of-two is facing a possible jail sentence after admitting microwaving the family cat. Nadine Trewin, 31, admitted killing her ginger cat Sasha in March last year after being bitten by a flea. Horsham magistrates heard how Trewin, of Crawley, W. Sussex, mixed depression medication with alcohol, before admitting her action to a friend. The case was adjourned until Jul 23 for pre-sentence reports." This woman is a mother?

30.6.01 Plan to use gerbils to detect spies. Genuine story of a plan to exploit gerbils' acute sensitivity to adrenalin to detect nervous spies at, say, airports. Apparently the plan was abandoned because the rodents can't distinguish between "I'm nervous (because I'm a spy)" and "I'm nervous (because I'm scared witless about flying)".

1.7.01 ICC's match-fixing deadline passes. So it's now too late for the International Cricket Council to fix matches.

5.7.01 Dormice plan to increase UK numbers. Side-splitting Ceefax office wit on display here. The story concerned a serious conservation plan to boost the dormice population - but isn't it just so much funnier to torture the syntax as if... wait for it!...   the dormice are doing the planning!! Oh, my aching laughter.

1.8.01 Striking donkeys ground helicopters. Accuracy once more sacrificed on the altar of ribald imagery. A seaside resort offered helicopter trips as well as traditional donkey rides. Everyone complained about the noise and the donkey owners went on strike, so the 'copter rides were cancelled.

1.8.01 "Code Red" worm fails to make debut. A slow news day at the start of the August silly season. Hence this non-headline about a non-news story about a non-threat to the internet.

20.9.01 IRA to increase arms issue efforts. One for the TV journalism training guide. What the writer tells us here is that the Irish Republican Army are trying harder than before to issue arms, i.e. hand them out. What the writer meant was precisely the opposite.

All genuine contributions of a similar nature welcome.