When the late Colin (Mr Ceefax) McIntyre retired from the BBC he became for a while consultant to Intelfax Ltd, an independent company providing ancillary services to television companies, among them Channel 4. Intelfax was contracted to run 4-Tel, a teletext service for the channel. Colin realised the value of enlivening the output with a memorable character and, recalling a dog he had seen drawn in teletext graphics, suggested a cartoon based around it - to be called 4-T. That was the beginning of a long-running series of cartoon adventures featuring 4-T and a weird assortment of characters, such as his great friends Wiggly and Vince the

 

 

 

 

 

Valve, robots such as Trashy (below) and numerous villains, including the evil Boxman. For those interested in such things, the series was created using the teletext mode of the BBC Acorn microcomputer, first on a model B, then a Master 128. Teletext graphics are very low resolution, based on a grid of 40 by 24 character spaces, compared to present-day mega-pixel standards - but sometimes, just sometimes, maybe less is more...The stories on this website have been retrieved from the original 5.25in floppy disks they were stored on. Work continues to rescue more of them via RetroClinic's DataCentre and BeebEm, a program which emulates a BBC micro on a PC.