I WAS watching a Peter Kay stand-up routine on telly the other night.

It was from early in his career and it was full of his usual delightful observations of life.

Aside from how young and slender he looked, it was interesting to realise how much the world has moved on.

The routine was recorded in 1999, just before the Millennium and Peter passed comment on this impending momentous line-in-the-sand of history.

Of course all comedy eventually dates to a greater or lesser extent.

We’re only talking about 17 years ago, but for anybody under the age of 20 - my children’s generation, in fact - Peter Kay might just as well have been talking in Martian.

How could a teenager today relate to jokes about recording films on long-play videos?

Or Ceefax? Or the singular charms of Jim Bowen and Bullseye?

I would argue in the past 20 years we’ve lived through the sort of cultural and societal shift akin to the industrial revolution.

OK, perhaps I’m over-egging the pudding, but keep up and you’ll see what I mean.

Back in 1999 we were living in an analogue age. Yes, we had mobile phones that were chunky and lacked interactive screens.

And we had the internet, albeit accompanied by the background whistle of dial-up.

But most people back then thought in analogue, their worldview formed by everything that had gone before. We were standing on the shoulders of giants.

Somewhere in the transition to a digital world we lost that sense of our past.

Something changed with the advent of iPhones and Facebook. And so did our behaviour.

Watching Peter Kay talking in 1999 about taking holiday snaps to Boots to be developed crystallised this change for me.

He said you used to walk out of the shop and nearly get run over by a lorry because you were too busy looking at your snaps.

A great observation of late 20th century behaviour. But when did you last do that?

That’s a change due to technological advancement. These days we take photos on our phones.

But the killer for me was when Peter Kay said you’d be embarrassed by the pictures you took of yourself mucking about. They came back with a ‘quality control’ sticker over the top.

In the age of selfies, where people seem only to take pictures of themselves pouting and gurning, the notion that we were once coy about such behaviour now seems quaint.

Gentle mugging for the camera in 1999 would be laughed off Facebook these days.

Conversely, if we hopped in a time machine and asked someone in 1999 what they thought of today’s self-absorbed Snapchat generation, I wonder what they would think.

Sociologists, I’ll give you that one for free.