[Humphrey Hacker]

A couple of points:

It struck me then that there wasn't much coverage of Oracle losing its licence. To me Oracle was far better than Teletext.

From what little I know about CPV it seemed that hubris that Frost seemed to generate at LWT and TVAM may have played a role in CPV's failure to win the London Weekday licence. As stated above the lack of a back-up plan from CPV regarding what would have happened if they had won and TV-AM had lost shows that there wasn't much actual planning.

We've sort of gone off on a tangent here but it must be remembered that originally in the 1990 Broadcasting Act there would be no teletext licence after 1992.  It was only after Oracle lobbed for it (they were happy to bid for it) it became a possibility, though the ultimate irony is they lost the licence they were trying to save for themselves

The actual closure of Oracle and handover to Teletext was put on YouTube a couple of years ago, as a tape that's ended up at Kaleidoscope for whatever reason is an SVHS recording which you can recover the teletext data from easily (you can do it from VHS as well buts its more cumbersome):
www.youtube.com 

Re: CPV-TV... well David Frost was on the consortium for that project, and what I understand seemed to have a knack of getting TV stations started and then them going downhill not long afterwards (LWT and TV-am are the two obvious examples here), so its probably a blessing in disguise CPV fell on its arse at the starting gun in all three regions they went for.

intention of the consortium was to create a centralised service for the franchises they went for with a generic presentation package apparently, which wasn't a new thing by 1991 (see ITV 1989)

Very true as they bid not just for London Weekdays but also Eastern and Southern England.