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n Australia social gatherings are back on the agenda, intrastate travel is permissible; playgrounds have reopened, and so have restaurants.
At the beginning of lockdown, we were told Shakespeare wrote King Lear while sheltering from a plague; we…

From going grey to hand washing: 12 lockdown habits we're going to keep

There was a very clearly defined moment where I fell in love with 30 Rock.
It’s seven glorious seconds early in the second season, when comedian Tracy Jordan (played by Tracy Morgan) performs his Monster Mash-inspired novelty song Werewolf Bar…

30 Rock: Tina Fey's satirical show-within-a-show mastered the art of the long-running gag

In our new series Stream Team, Guardian Australia’s arts writers dig out their favourite hidden gems of streaming to help you while away some isolated hours.
As we all hunker down in our homes and desperately watch things to help us cope with being…

Mystery Science Theater 3000: a cry-laugh bonkers show for truly insane times

It doesn’t take much to turn a rice cooker into a bomb, according to South Korean theatre-maker Jaha Koo. He discovered this accidentally, when trying to reprogram a rice cooker to talk.
This wasn’t an idle endeavour. Koo had decided he wanted to…

Talking rice cookers, accidental explosions: how do you capture austerity on stage?

We’re four episodes into the third season of The Good Place, the brilliant US sitcom which started off being based around four recently deceased people in the afterlife and is now … um, what is it about now? Friendship, or something? It’s still…

The Good Place's Australian accents are bad. But maybe that's the joke?

Why is Australia in the Eurovision Song Contest?
Great question. It’s because Australia is part of Europe, just next to Germany.
Oh, that’s funny.
All right, it’s because SBS, the TV station that shows Eurovision in Australia, is part of the European…

Eurovision 2018: everything Australians need to know before watching

When Dustyesky first took the stage at dusk on Saturday for Womadelaide, my 14-month-old son raced down the hill towards them at breakneck speed, so overwhelmed was he by the sheer magnetism of their lusty masculinity. Or perhaps because he too has a…

Dustyesky's Russian folk songs and accent comedy – it shouldn't work, but it does

Oh, to have been a fly on the wall during the pitch meeting for The Good Place. Who’d have thought that ratings gold would be found in a sitcom about the afterlife, with regular references to Immanuel Kant, David Hume and Aristotle? It presumably…

The Good Place: how a sitcom made philosophy seem cool

It’s to their credit that Gang of Youths were able to turn the myth of the difficult second album into an advantage. On the towering Go Farther in Lightness, Dave Le’aupepe documents his struggle with moving on from thinking about death all the damn…

From Gang of Youths to Jen Cloher: 2017's top Australian albums

It sounds like a cop out to say this but, on the basis of the first three episodes of Tonightly with Tom Ballard, the ABC’s new daily comedy-news show, the problem is the audience.
Maybe it’s the space, since the show appears to be shot in a studio…

Tonightly review – Tom Ballard’s new show shows promise, with one glaring problem

On Monday Australia woke to learn that it would be getting its own national space agency. Delivering the keynote speech at the International Astronomical Congress in Adelaide, Michaelia Cash said the agency is already at work on a charter, the…

It's exciting that Australia is getting a space agency. But what will it do?

Deep Space Station 43 is an imposing piece of hardware. It’s a 70-metre diameter radio telescope, the largest in the southern hemisphere, and on this cold Canberra Friday night, red lights were flashing to signify it was sending data to one of the…

Tracing Cassini's fiery death was like seeing a heart monitor flatline

In Better Call Saul, the Breaking Bad prequel which is shooting its fourth series, the character of the morally flexible lawyer Jimmy McGill (played by Bob Odenkirk) comes closer and closer to becoming the character we first met him as: the ethically…

Vince Gilligan on Better Call Saul: 'We dread the future as much as the fans do'

From the folks behind the watching-regular-people-watching-television smash hit Gogglebox comes another slice of ultra-low-budget content creation. In the new reality series, Common Sense, a bunch of Australians from different walks of life, at their…

Common Sense: four things we learned from the Gogglebox-style news show

There’s something satisfying simple about True Story with Hamish & Andy, not least because it does exactly what is says on the box.
There’s nothing flash about the premise. A person sits down and tells a favourite personal anecdote – which,…

True Story with Hamish & Andy reflects the reassuring myths we need right now

The phrase “kidding on the square” is used to describe a situation in which someone is joking while simultaneously being dead serious.
It was popularised by Al Franken, the former Saturday Night Live writer and performer turned Democratic senator for…

Kirin J Callinan: Bravado review – seriously talented at taking the piss

If there’s one positive takeaway from the furious sociopolitical mess that has been 2016, it’s that protest music is alive and well in Australia. And not before time.
AB Original is the project of Briggs (aka Adam Briggs), the Yorta Yorta rapper,…

AB Original on Reclaim Australia, the album: 'Being black, everything you do becomes a protest'

There’s an old saying about the writing mindset – attributed to everyone from Dorothy Parker to George RR Martin – which essentially runs: “Writing is intolerable, not writing is intolerable; the only acceptable state is having just written.”
This…

I've spent the last five years writing about Australian politics. Send help

There’s a very particular complaint that pops up with reasonable frequency from a very specific type of politics nerd, generally just after Paul Keating has made a public pronouncement. It is this: the language of Australian politics has become…

The Hansard Monologues: Age of Entitlement review – Bishop blazes, Morrison not so much

It’s a rare gig that genuinely takes the audience on a journey but that is exactly what happened in this, Vivid Sydney’s first New Order with the Australian Chamber Orchestra.
The band last popped by in 2012, welcoming the original keyboard player,…