The original horse-drawn internet, Ceefax is finally no more: a brilliantly cheap, brilliantly simple, hugely successful piece of technology that somehow seemed to age at triple-speed.
"For them, it was hugely significant, the simple fact that the highest-ranking official in the country who deals with these issues took the time to talk to them about their experiences with long-term unemployment," Maria Heidkamp, director of the network, told the Guardian.
It is a powerfully strange book, at once very simple yet hugely complicated.
And they said that their study, while hugely controversial, was relatively simple: figuring out the appropriate labels to place on the behaviors in the individual cases.
It is all a far cry from their 1997 manifesto pledge: "Our fundamental purpose is simple but hugely important: to restore the NHS as a public service working cooperatively for patients not a commercial business driven by competition".
Listen here It would be a simple – and hugely enjoyable – task to make a list of 101 amazing and odd jazz LPs on Spotify, but if you wanted to narrow the field down a little, Joe McPhee's 1970 free jazz masterpiece would be a good place to start.
The story is simple, and hugely in debt to Lovecraft, Quatermass and the Pit and Invasion of the Body Snatchers: a spacecraft is discovered buried in the woods, and when excavated releases a gas that makes the townsfolk turn into the alien race that once inhabited the craft.
Mr Grillo's simple and hugely popular argument is that Italian politics of both left and right is rotten to the core and the nation's only hope is to sack all professional politicians – "tutti a casa!" roared the Rome crowd, "send them all home!" – and replace them with honest, well-intentioned Italians who will resist the temptations of power and set their country on the road back to sanity.
This debate does not look likely to have determined who will win the general election but it may crystallise one single, simple and hugely significant fact - the shape of British politics has changed for good.
It's brutally simple but hugely effective.
