h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

That's it, I'm old.

Yesterday one of the girls in our office glanced at her watch and said 'It's five to five'. So, naturally, I shouted 'Crackerjack!'.
Result?
She looked at me with a totally blank face and asked what the Hell I was on about.

Crackerjack!

You're not too old, she's too young. I'm suddenly finding this these days. I'm no longer bothered whether girls in their early twenties are attracted to me or not, because they're boring!

Or they don't get what I'm on about half the time, because we don't have the shared life-experience - which of course amounts to the same thing.

Mind you, said girl is a bit ditzy- I once had to explain to her the significance of saying that someone had been paid 30 pieces of silver.

I suggest you don't have her as a partner in your next pub quiz

My partner's 17 yo daughter didn't know who Reagan was when he died and I discovered in the same conversation she hadn't heard of John Lennon!

Ah, Crackerjack... the quicksand of cultural reference.

I go through this experience with my uni cohort every day, since I'm 20 years older than most of them!

The only thing that makes you old, though, Kerr, is believing that its happening. Me, I'll always be about 22, no matter what the mirror says.

I regularly find that the staff at Sainsbury's deli counter don't know how much a quarter weighs.

>My partner's 17 yo daughter didn't know who Reagan was when he died and I discovered in the same conversation she hadn't heard of John Lennon!,

What a fortunate child to have missed two of the biggest blights on the planet in the last forty years.

I did once hear The Beatles refered to as 'The band Paul McCartney was in before Wings'. That might me pause a while.

That is strange, that someone remembers Wings. Now I know that they were a massive band at the time, but they seem to have disappeared entirely from the radar. I can't for the life of me remember the last time I heard a Wings track on the radio; we must be talking coming on for decades here.

Hmm, I've heard 'Band on the Run' and 'Live and let Die' within the last week, oddly enough.

I hear both on a regular basis. They're on the local's jukebox, and get played alarmingly often. Not that they're bad songs as such, but really.

Actually Kerr as it wasn't Friday and it's five to five you must not be that old as you wouldn't shoult out Crackerjack on a Tuesday evening oh no!

Good point DD

Don't emigrate Kerr... the number of cultural references that don't match here is scary. I say things without thinking - referring to stuff that everybody knows about in Scotland - and receive blank stares. It happens so often that people now say to me "It's a Pommy thing, right?"

Interestingly, there are far fewer Aussie cultural references that I miss out on. I can only think of three or four occasions when I've had to ask for an explanation. I wonder why that is? I would dare suggest that it's a cultural desert here of course

To be fair, it isn't a cultural desert at all. But it is perplexing

That would be the insidious influence of Neighbours on British society

All right DD- it wasn't Friday, but it was close enough.

GD's probably right Fb, we already get most of oz's output inflicted on us.

"Most of Oz's output" being Neighbours and Home & Away?

I can't believe I'm about to do this, but.....

There's a lot more to Australian TV than bad soap operas. There are some really good dramas and there's some fantastic documentary making - not to mention excellent current affairs. ABC and SBS TV stations are good... almost BBC standard, but not quite

As for kids programmes - well there are some very idiosyncratic (and indescribably awful) things which everybody knows about here - rather like Crackerjack in UK. But on the whole, there are fewer of them and a lot of the kids' stuff is imported from UK and US.

This will sound horribly un-PC, but frankly I think it's safe to assume that OZ tv isn't the difference maker here.

The difference maker is the insularity of Australia compared to the UK. We still tend to regard ourselves as part of the Commonwealth and Part of Europe and part of the Trans-Atlantic alliance, thus having a pretty good news covergae of all three.

Oz mostly sems to see itself as part of OZ, and then maybe South-East Asia, and then as part of the TransPacific Pact.

Hardly suprising that the points of reference are different, really.

You know, I'm suddenly struggling to think when I last saw a news story about Australia...
... A couple of weeks ago I think. That millionaire that snuffed it.

Points of cultural reference aren't news though. But I would guess if you did a stufdy you would fuind that the UK's appreciation of Aussie cultural references far proceeds Aussie Soaps on our tv's.

And it can't all have been Barry Humphries and Clive James fault either. Though of course, the earliest examples of Dame Edna are Humphries comments on the strange cultural assumptions of suburban Australia when looking at the rest of the world.