Delightful Mirth

An often overlooked damage of Brexit is the cultural catastrophe it caused. Not limited to excluding the United Kingdom from the Erasmus project for years, it also concerns the availability of English-language media in the European Union.

Before Brexit, it was extremely easy for EU citizens to buy books or DVDs online from bookshops or private collectors located beyond the Channel. No customs checks, no import fees and low shipping rates.

After Brexit, shipping rates have skyrocketed, you have import fees and possible customs checks. The availability of items that can be shipped to the EU has also decreased. The shipping process is extremely slow, to boot.

This is why many British small businesses were forced to give up on selling and shipping to the EU.

Sure, in the streaming era you can easily watch contents in English. And the likes of Amazon do sell books in English pretty much anywhere. However, you can only access to what these mega corporations want you to have, which is mainstream contents. Because Amazon or Netflix don't really care about that 80s indie movie you were looking for, or that niche novel that you'd really like to read. And now your chances to get these from an indie bookshop in Bristol, or from someone emptying their attic in Newcastle upon Tyne, are way slimmer.

This impoverished cultural landscape mainly affects lesser known titles, that were never translated into other languages. Or kinds of media that allegedly don't have much appeal outside the Anglosphere, like recorded Broadway or West End musicals.

On a personal level, the struggle is a particularly dire one to me. I regularly consume media in English and I love musicals, but I'm from Italy. A dubbing country, which ranks among the lowest (if not the lowest) when it comes to the general fluency in English in Europe. Even in 2026, the interest in English-language (or foreign language in general) media is extremely low here, and as a consequence the general offer is even lower.