When I was young there was a sense that the world was much bigger, by which I mean that many more parts of it seemed to be too remote to understand or experience.

For example, if a song or movie reached number one in America it might not even get a release in the UK. And even if it did, a large studio or record company had to decide to make a substantial investment in pressing records, putting out cassettes or making an actual print of a movie for distribution in another country.

A gap of three to six months between the US and UK release was common. This allowed time for the stars or bands to become available for a publicity tour, and for the US film prints to finish their first run and be repurposed for a second use in other countries.

But it wasn’t as if we missed these releases. Without the internet it was quite hard to know what was big in America. We might hear rumours of a song called Ice Ice Baby, or a film called Home Alone, but we’d have to wait, possibly months, to actually experience either of them.