Could it be that you were in Australia instead? TV in Austria is always synchronized to German, the only English you could find there on TV is on foreign channels (BBC,...) or very specialized ones that only few people watch. Only channel except news channel Deutsche Welle (switches every hour between English and German) is ARTE and there the languagw is French, not English.

Not really. In my parents generation (they are in their 50s) primary/secondary school divided kids into good and not so good pupils. Only those in the good group got English education, the others didn't get any at all. So my parents English is pretty much limited to "hello". In my generation (30s) all kids got English education, but it still was very basic (My name is ..., colours, where is the nearest railway station, ...). Only if you actually continued to a higher education, English education improved. But without practice it is faster forgotten than learned. TV is synchronized to German, books are translated, ... so unless you need the language in your daily life (job) the English knowledge is gone as fast as my French which I learned until I was 18 and then never needed again. Nowadays English education is a lot better and thanks to the internet you also get a chance to practice it. So if you are at a party with younger people, changes are high that their English is good enough, but if you try it with e.g. a supermarket employee above 40 it is pretty unlikely that they'll understand you trying to find flour.