Years before our father relented and bought us a video player, we holidayed with a family who packed one of the devices with them for our week together at the beach.
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Such decadence was foreign, possibly seditious, and we exchanged furtive glances as the confident children of this family set about connecting the machine to the unit's television, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
They also brought two tapes with them; Monty Python's Life of Brian and The Man from Snowy River. Each very different film has its obvious charms, but we were particularly taken with the Australian movie, not because of its breathtaking beauty, rich cultural heritage or its romance, but because you could rewind the bit where Tom Burlinson rides his horse down the mountain ... over and over and over and over again.
I haven't experienced such audio-visual satisfaction until last night, when we fast-forwarded our way through the Golden Globes on Stan.
Thanks to the crisp interactivity of modern-day streaming, fast-forwarding, rewinding and pausing is a breeze and such super-charged features at subscribers' fingertips must surely pose an existential threat to bloated industry back-slapping ceremonies far greater than the diversity row embroiling the Hollywood Foreign Press Association.
I'll never watch another awards show in full again.
Why would you?
Along with the awkward red carpet interviews, we were able to zoom past Sean Penn and Volodymyr Zelensky (seriously, him again?) and come to screeching halts for Michelle Yeoh and each time Jennifer Coolidge graced the stage. You'd be mad not to give Eddie Murphy your undivided attention and he was flat-out hilarious spoofing Will Smith when accepting the Cecil B. DeMille award.
We stopped to see how that kid from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom is all grown up, and Jamie Lee Curtis, so effortlessly classy, is always worth a few seconds of your time.
Host Jerrod Carmichael's costume changes necessitated a slow drive-by, but his lead-balloon jokes made you want to speed up all over again. Carmichael seemed determined to unsettle the audience (a Scientology joke in a Hollywood room is crazy-brave) and even though some may think his predecessor, Ricky Gervais, does confrontation better, Carmichael still provided that element of danger required to make awards shows remotely bearable.
It's often the stuff of TV legend.
There's the snub (Marlon Brando - 45th Academy Awards), the kiss (Adrien Brody/Halle Berry - 75th Academy Awards), the slap (94th Academy Awards).
Closer to home, Bert Newton appeared in genuine danger when Muhammad Ali thought he was being racially vilified by the host of the 1979 Logies and, years later, at another Logies, I'm pretty sure Benita from Play School wasn't wearing a bra.
Then again, maybe that was a dream.
But it's not all cringe, awards shows have their touching moments, too.
The joy of Sally Field's best actress Oscar acceptance speech for 1985's Places in the Heart remains infectious, even if it is often misquoted ("Right now, you like me!" she said, not "You like me! You really like me!").
Each generation has its own favourite Oscar speeches, a couple of mine are from a few decades ago.
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Like Field, Kevin Costner spoke to what must be an overwhelming feeling of validation when you score an Academy Award.
"It's very easy for people to trivialise what we do," he said when accepting the 1991 best picture gong for Dances with Wolves.
"They do it in ways of saying, well, if it's such a big deal, how come nobody remembers who last year won the Oscar ... and I've got a real flash for you, I will never forget what happened here tonight; my family will never forget what happened here, my Native American brothers and sisters across the country, especially Lakota Sioux, will never forget. People I went to school with will never forget. Dances with Wolves won this year and while it's not as important as the rest of world's situation where it sits, it will always be important to us, and we thank you for this."
Great speech, if not a bit wordy.
The year before, accepting the 1990 best actor Oscar for My Left Foot, Daniel Day-Lewis was more succinct.
"You've just provided me with the makings of one hell of a weekend in Dublin."
