Fastext is basically the four coloured buttons that are basically shortcuts to pages. It isn't related to page caching.

I think in practice, TV's that had Fastext also had memory for pages. I couldn't find much info so for any people searching in the future: search FLOF in https://www.etsi.org/deliver/etsi_i_ets/300700_300799/300706...

I can't say my parents' TVs had zero memory, but it was at least very limited compared to my grandparents' TV.

The former was maybe fast if you were on page X and navigated to page X+1, X+2, maybe X+3 and X+4 (is that how the coloured buttons were usually arranged?) but for everything else was slow.

At my grandparents, every page was retrieved almost instantly.

>is that how the coloured buttons were usually arranged?

I think it depends on the system in use, but from my recollection it was a hierachical system - so from the home-page you may have links to News, Sport, Weather and TV Listings; from the News Page, the links may have been to National News, Regional News, etc.

Maybe when you got to an individual story one would be a link to 'next page' (or story) and the other 'previous page'?

One of the best uses I found was a low-fi daily quiz. Each page had a question and four answers, and you pushed the button for which you thought was correct. I think it also demonstrated that pages need not have a completely numeric id - I recall the quiz pages being something like '12;' - presumably to stop you cheating and jumping directly to an answer.

For more info on the quiz: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bamboozle!

It makes sense given how expensive memory used to be. I also remember my grandparents TV having much better teletext than mine.

I believe Fastext was implemented with pre-caching. Since the page declared which the four page numbers were, the Teletext decoder was able to pre-fetch those pages while you read? This is what made it fast.

Essentially if you spent half a minute reading a page, the four coloured fast text pages were already received.