It’s strange the different strands of culture we constantly negotiate. The Rolling Stones bring out a new album and this comes hot on the heels of the Brandenburg Orchestra’s ravishing homage to seventeenth-century music which left those who saw it staggered. The guest director Théotime Langlois de Swarte used his baroque violin to make Vivaldi and Purcell seem like miracles of psychological intensity and the whole performamnce had a glorious purity of articulation as if the apprehension of the baroque had been reinvented before the audience’s eyes. How does this tally with the invitation to the latest revival of Mamma Mia The Musical? Well, quite naturally in one way, weirdly in another. Melbourne had been lucky to get the Melbourne Opera’s production of Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda but it’s a very different thing however much it represents the popular music of the ninteenth century. And Donizetti with his gorgeous bel canto was also in the neo-Shakespearean tradition of adpating Schiller to the opera, a process of translation that has its greatest realisation in Verdi’s Don Carlos.

And, of course, it’s interesting to think of the different ways of doing Donizetti. There’s the crystalline purity of a Joan Sutherland but then there’s also the smouldering and psychologised intensity of a Callas, less flawless but so vibrant with violated life (think of her early von Karajan Lucia di Lammermoor). In any case Melbourne audiences have been lucky to get as fine a singer as Helena Dix fresh from doing Norma at the Metropolitan in New York in the title role of Maria Stuarda.

It was also a marvellous thing to see Greta Scacchi back in 2008 play Elizabeth I with a scarifying power and a lack of glamourous mannerism in the production of the original Schiller play, Mary Stuart, one of the greatest homages to Renaissance drama ever written in that very fine production at Sydney’s Ensemble theatre.

How does all this tally with television at the moment? Well, Sam Reid has had his stints doing classic theatre in Britain – and he was recently in a streamer of Interview with a Vampire which didn’t seem winning – but he’s back now in The Newsreader, that ABC series that looks at the recent past of Australian history through an hourglass that is nothing if not contemporary. Anna Torv and Sam Reid are co-hosts of a news programme, on old-time commercial TV and they are also an item though there’s the complicating factor that Sam also likes the boys and – although he’s committed to Torv – he is regularly tempted by the chaps who proposition him. Then there’s the background with William McGuiness as a loathsome head producer who would sell anyone down the river and Robert Taylor (a joy to spot recently in The Meg, the Jason Statham shark film) as the old pro who has been betrayed and gone to another channel. He’s an impressive figure from another world and he has the great advantage of being married to a splendid and shrewd warhorse in Marg Downey. The Newsreader deliberately toys with anachronism in some of its casting but in attractive ways that highlight the affinities of the present with the past. The first episode of season two is about the 1987 election between Bob Hawke and John Howard and it includes a brilliant scene in which Anna Torv rushes to interview Paul Keating and we actually hear in response to one of her questions the man who transformed the Australian economy come out with his famous question about Andrew Peacock, ‘Can a soufflé rise twice?’ It all creates a perspective shift as past and present click and show themselves to be both the same and different. Tom Keneally, the novelist who has written Australian history as narrative, has always said that we learn our history from our soaps and The Newsreader is brilliant in the way it does this. The effect is uncanny both for the old timer who remembers the direct quotation from the time that is highlighted and in a different way for the younger person who is a bit captivated seeing the legend come alive with the very voice of history. And, of course, there’s plenty of titillation in the ongoing drama of who Sam Reid wants to take his pants off for. We know his heart’s in the right place but there are things that won’t stay still. And then there are the dark forces that are happy to sacrifice the couple’s career on the whim of a power lord. All of this is superbly acted and the vision of just yesterday’s Australia is at once strange and familiar like a dream with not quite compatible elements.

All the acting in The Newsreader is terrific but if you want to single out a performance it would have to be Marg Downey as the old newsreader’s wife. She is wily, she is decent and she speaks in the cultivated tones of an Australia we’re in danger of letting slip from our memories. This is a supporting performance that glows and glows.

How much is that true of The Little Mermaid that is now on Disney+? It seemed a blessing to stumble upon it given that it was only in cinemas a few weeks ago. Well, it’s lavish and it’s full of choreographed fish that will engage the young mind. Halle Bailey sings well as the heroine which is more than can be said for the handsome clean-cut hero Jonah Hauer-King who has an unmistakably limited actor’s voice when he has to break into song. Then there are the old stagers. It’s disconcerting to realise King Triton is played by that grand and sometimes sinisterly shadowed actor Javier Bardem and who is this – in a blatant example of what would once have been an Angela Lansbury role – as the octopus witch? Why, it’s that fabulous comedienne and character actress Melissa McCarthy. She does what’s asked of her but this is not the riveting woman who transfixes us in comic performance after comic performance. Is it too obvious to say she seems just a bit out of her depth? None of which is to deny that if you’re eight years old or have just absent-mindedly eaten your children’s hash cookies The Little Mermaid will do the trick.