Next month: March 2001
BBC teletext had the machine (Merlin - obviously, its placard was visible during the draw build-up), but also initially left the ball set blank. I phoned up Camelot earlier than usual and got the ball set number (8) from them. Only a few minutes later, up popped that number on BBC teletext, hmmm...maybe I should have put the wrong number up :-)
It was irritating to have to wait some 75 minutes for Camelot to issue the results - I had to phone them something like 6 times tonight to finally get all the figures (they were slow with both the Extra and Thunderball full results). However, the one compensation is that I easily beat both ITV and BBC teletext to putting them up.
Amusingly, when I got the full results from Camelot's phone line, they couldn't actually tell me how much was rolled over to Wednesday's draw from tonight's main lottery, even when I phoned again 10 minutes later. The same "missing" figure was duly omitted from BBC 1's teletext, but I reverse-calculated it and put it on the site of course, ahead of even Camelot's own phone line :-)
ITV teletext was even worse - not only didn't they have the unwon jackpot amount, they also had a headline "one ticket scoops the 4m jackpot" (was still there on Sunday at 12.40am - clearly a headline from last Wednesday's draw !) right above text that correctly stated that no-one had won the jackpot tonight. They also failed to update their Extra lottery info correctly (still having some of Wednesday's info on it - seems like someone was asleep at the wheel of ITV's teletext controls tonight...).
Previous month: January 2001