IT’S the experience that makes you feel you’ve stepped out of a time machine into a strange and scary future.

You mention a film, a TV personality, or some big event of years gone by that you think everyone knows about.

But people look at you blankly, as though you’d just suggested everybody should hop on the omnibus and take in a magic lantern show. “A bit before my time,” they say.

Earlier this week, the Independent ran this headline online: “The forgotten British comedian who paved the way for Alan Partridge and David Brent.”

And who was that “forgotten” comic they were talking about? Tony Hancock. A performer who attracted TV and radio audiences of a size unimaginable today, causing pubs to stay empty until his show finished. A comedian whose fans include the likes of singer Pete Doherty, Star Wars star Mark Hamill and any number of today’s comedians who owe him a huge debt.

I felt sorry for Joe Sommerlad, who wrote the very good piece in the Independent about the Bournemouth-raised comedian, only to have it undermined by that headline and resulting tweet. Later, the publication made an ever-so-slight tweak – by changing “forgotten” to “legendary”.

Something similar happened earlier in the year, when the Times ran a story about new developments in the investigation into the death of Natalie Wood in 1981.

The headline: “Mystery over death of film star’s wife 35 years ago.”

Natalie Wood was hardly a “film star’s wife”. She was a major movie star, with three Oscar nominations, and a filmography that includes Miracle on 34th Street, Rebel Without a Cause, The Searchers, West Side Story, Gypsy and The Great Race. Her sometime husband Robert Wagner was a minor actor by comparison before finding success in Hart to Hart on TV.

It’s quite possible the people writing these headlines were too young to have enjoyed these entertainers first time around, and that’s not their fault. But it’s worrying that people aren’t picking up this kind of information from general knowledge, or at least doing a bit of Googling to catch up.

You’ll often hear that such things were “before my time” – but by that yardstick, there’s no shame in never having heard of Shakespeare. If you never experience entertainment from before your time, you’re missing out.

The irony here is that today, we have easy access to the best entertainment of decades, even centuries, gone past.

Years ago, the only films you could experience were the ones playing near you, or the ones you stayed in to watch on television. Today, a wealth of famous and obscure movies, from the silent era to today, are easily found online. (Just as long as you don’t rely on Netflix, which is pretty feeble when it comes to films from the 20th century.)

Sampling unfamiliar music used to require gambling money on expensive records, or at least listening to a lot of radio. Now, you can try just about any music for free, through the likes of YouTube and Spotify.

But these platforms have also made it a lot easier just to stick to the kind of things you already like. Online, algorithms will recommend choices that are similar to the entertainment you’ve previously enjoyed. And the sheer wealth of material out there means that you can keep on consuming more of the same for a very long time.

Ironically, we might have been more likely to discover new and different things in the days when the traditional broadcasters chose what entertainment to offer us, and when. And if the BBC served up a Tony Hancock celebration, or a film with Natalie Wood, you could give it a try, switch channels or read a book.

I wouldn’t want to go back to that era, but it had its benefits.

Of course, that was before a lot of people’s time.