I think the books were very squarely aimed at middle class men who had been children in the 1960s and 1970s and teenagers in the 1970s and 1980s. Crooked World in particular is all about the cartoons that were on UK Children's television in the 70s.

I could keep up with most of the references to television - it has a very homogenised experience in the 1970s and, to a lesser extent, the 1980s but I don't think I ever really caught all the music references, of which I gather there were many in the books.