Stephan Elliott says Hugo Weaving, Guy Pearce and Terence Stamp are ‘onboard’ and the sequel will be set partly in Australia but will also head overseas

A sequel to The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert is in the works, director Stephan Elliott has confirmed, with the film’s stars Terence Stamp, Guy Pearce and Hugo Weaving “onboard” to come back.

Elliott confirmed to Guardian Australia that he will serve as director, writer and producer on the sequel and that the script has been finished. The 1994 original starred Weaving, Pearce and Stamp as drag queens who drive a bus – the titular Priscilla – from Sydney to Alice Springs.

Continue reading...

Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

War in Gaza, floods in Dubai, the knife attack in Sydney and the Grand National at Aintree: the last seven days as captured by the world’s leading photojournalists

Warning: this gallery contains images that some readers may find distressing

Continue reading...

The Royal Academy is examining the part it has played in Britain’s history of slavery and empire – and the usual carping suspects will not be pleased

Very recent visitors from Mars may not know of the regular attacks on the National Trust for being “woke ”, but the rest of us have heard plenty. The trust’s latest onslaught on British values has something to do with the lack of butter in the scones . Never mind that they have been made like this for years; Tory MPs and other critics perceive the keen threat to British values posed by margarine .

Such stories never stop coming. This week, Kemi Badenoch , the trade secretary, opined that the UK did not grow rich through “colonialism or imperialism or white privilege or whatever”, but owed its success to the Glorious Revolution of 1688. This is the kind of half-digested, badly regurgitated history that leads to a forlorn Tony Hancock asking if Magna Carta died in vain.

Continue reading...

The Tortured Poets Department depicts a spell of post-breakup mania against the perfect backdrop of the Eras tour – a thrillingly immature reality undermined by safe music

As The Tortured Poets Department (TTPD) finally sees its official release, the intention behind the title remains as enigmatic as it was when Taylor Swift announced it two months ago. The title track seems to mock one such tortured poet who carts a typewriter around and likens the budding couple to Patti Smith and Dylan Thomas. “We’re modern idiots,” Swift laughs. The album’s aesthetic wallows in anguish and Swift’s liner notes and social media captions are littered with self-consciously poetic proclamations. And the erratic period captured in the lyrics couldn’t be further from a life of cloistered studiousness.

TTPD depicts a manic phase in Swift’s life last year, the reality behind the perfect stagecraft of the Eras tour. Wild-eyed from what sounds like the slow dissolution of a six-year relationship, she lunged at a once-forbidden paramour with a taste for dissolution, a foul mouth and a well-founded bad reputation. The latter, she makes clear as she sings repeatedly about flouting paternalistic and public censure, was a central part of the attraction: “He was chaos, he was revelry,” Swift sings on But Daddy (evidently about the 1975’s Matty Healy).

Continue reading...

Central European tourists have been descending on Achill ever since Heinrich Böll wrote effusively about its inhabitants’ customs and idiosyncrasies

In 1954, the German writer Heinrich Böll landed in Ireland for the first time, headed west and kept going till he reached the Atlantic ocean. He was seeking a refuge from the brash materialism of postwar Germany, and found it on Achill island, where waves crashed against cliffs, sheep foraged in fields and villagers went about their business of fishing, farming and storytelling.

The following year he returned with his family and began to observe and chronicle the customs, idiosyncrasies, sorrows and joys of its inhabitants. So began a literary love affair between Germany and a windswept corner of County Mayo that endures 70 years after the Nobel laureate’s first visit.

Continue reading...

In this week’s newsletter: Navigating the ever-changing world of streaming services is head-spinning, so here are our favourite shows on every one right now

• Don’t get the Guide delivered to your inbox? Sign up to get the full article here

This week it’s a return to our “a show for every streamer” format, where – yep – we recommend a show to watch for every streaming service. We last did one of these two years ago , and since then the landscape has dramatically shifted. Some streamers have been folded into others (BritBox is now part of ITVX in the UK), some have rebranded (goodbye IMDb TV, hello Amazon Freevee), some have shuttered (RIP Sundance Now), and some, confusingly, have rebranded then shuttered (so long Lionsgate+, formerly Starzplay, we hardly knew thee). And tellingly very few new streaming services have emerged, suggesting that an industry that has had to reckon with the unsustainable levels of growth it had previously encouraged.

Still, even if streaming is in a period of contraction, there’s still an awful lot of services around. Here are our picks for the must watch shows on each of the major streamers, from Apple to ITVX (note to our international readers: this is a guide for UK streaming sites, but hopefully most of the below is available in some form to you too):

Continue reading...

At the world’s biggest barrel of laughs, Hannah Gadsby, John Kearns and Rose Matafeo rub shoulders with homegrown stars-in-the-making. Our writer has the time of his life

What’s the biggest comedy festival in the world? Parochial Britons would say Edinburgh . Internationalists may consider Montreal’s Just for Laughs . They would all be wrong. Just for Laughs is out of the running: it filed for bankruptcy protection earlier this year, its future in doubt. And the Edinburgh fringe is a performing arts festival not just comedy. So for now, if only on that technicality, Melbourne has the biggest comedy festival in the world: a three-week carnival of standup, sketch and beyond, dedicated to nothing but the art of making people laugh.

In 20-plus years writing about comedy, I had never been – until now. But I have felt its influence. Twice recently, the winner of its most outstanding show award went on to win the Edinburgh equivalent. One was Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette , arguably the most significant standup set of the last decade, which launched in Melbourne before conquering the world. And as recently as 2022, a former Melbourne champ – recent Taskmaster star Sam Campbell – won Edinburgh’s top prize, of which Australia has now provided more winners than any other non-UK country. The festival also played a weathervane role in the “trans debate”, when its main award – for years known as the Barry, after Barry Humphries – was re-named after the Dame Edna star’s divisive comments about transgender people .

Continue reading...

Read 15 remaining paragraphs | Comments