Looking through a 1986 Smash Hits the picture made me smile At 41p a minute it would have been cheaper to buy the singles. The cheapest Record Player or Personal Stereo would have given better sound quality as well. I wonder how many parents were horrified when they got their next phone bill.
I forgot about some of those crazy things they used to sell over the phone. This kind of came back in the early 2000's when they sold music ring-tones and kids were running up huge bills for the latest Backstreet Boys Ringtone.
A premium line service I did try was Interactive Teletext. I thought about mentioning that in my first post but realised Teletext wouldn't mean anything to people outside Europe. For people in Europe who are wondering how it worked you dialled in and were given a page number and timed page "time" to enter. Then the fun started. Using voice recognition you could access lots of pages not normally broadcast such as Company finance analysis. The pages were broadcast especially for you and appeared on the TV quite quickly. It obviously didn't catch on as the service disappeared as quickly as it appeared. It probably wasn't anything as advanced as Minitel in France, but worked using the TV sets most people had by the early 1990s.
