Isn’t it weird the way our newspapers seem suddenly to have discovered the obituary. David Stratton, loved and revered for his TV shows about film with Margaret Pomeranz was going to receive the range of attention normally reserved only for the legends of popular culture but then the film director Bruce Beresford added to his original comments and showed how significant an obituary could be. By the way, wasn’t it the case that David Stratton refused to give a classification to Pasolini’s Salò when it was finally made available because he disapproved of the great director’s coupling of de Sade and fascism in scenes of sometimes almost unwatchable cruelty?

It seemed a strange reaction given the truth of Bob Ellis’ remark that Pasolini only made masterpieces. This is manifestly true of everything from The Gospel According to Saint Matthew with its wobbling camera and its transfiguration of a neorealist idiom to make the gospel story seem to have a documentary truth, through the Maria Callas Medea to Teorema where Terence Stamp seems to have the key that unlocked the terrors of every human heart as he comes by night.

The ST. ALi Italian Film Festival has Paolo Sorrentino’s La Grazia but it’s a pity this festival doesn’t include an anthology of the work of one of the Italian greats rather than a giallo tribute. It would be marvellous to see a batch of the great films of Pasolini or Antonioni, De Sica or Fellini.

It is appropriate that the Australian classic Looking for Alibrandi with Greta Scacchi should get a revival and there’s a box-office hit The Boy with Pink Trousers which is an Italian take about online bullying. But in a world of commemoration it’s good to see that Terence Stamp was accorded an obituary. The emphasis was on his vividness in the early Christopher Reeve Superman films but some baby boomers will remember him in the Peter Ustinov-directed film of Herman Melville’s Billy Budd in which Stamp plays an angelic innocent who falls into the hands of the sadistic Claggart, played with psychopathic menace by that great American actor Robert Ryan. There is, of course, a musical version of this story in the form of Benjamin Britten’s opera in which the well-intentioned Captain De Vere was played by Britten’s partner, that incomparable tenor Peter Pears, and the score had magnificent dramatic realisation here in Australia with Neil Armfield’s stage production.

Stamp was nominated for an Oscar for Billy Budd and won best actor at Cannes for The Collector. But he did everything. Remember him in John Schlesinger’s film of Thomas Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd in which he plays Sergeant Troy in a cast that includes Julie Christie, Alan Bates and Peter Finch.

He had a captivating, very 1960s beauty when he was young and it’s good that he’s celebrated in a world that sometimes seems only to remember the likes of Maggie Smith and Richard Harris because they were in Harry Potter. Terence Stamp actually did a complete audio recording with an impressive cast of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials which is generally reckoned to be the greatest literary work for kids who are up to its ongoing challenge. The Book of Dust is the latest volume. Terence Stamp was also unforgettably vivid in Priscilla, Queen of the Desert as Bernadette.

We now have cast lists for the new Harry Potter TV series even though the original trio (Emma Watson, Daniel Radcliffe and Rupert Grint) spurned J.K. Rowling at the 20th anniversary reunion because her erstwhile stars were so bitterly opposed to her position on transgender people which seems inexplicable to the Zedders.

The casting has secured many of the leads for the series which will start screening in 2027. That fine actress Janet McTeer is to play that ‘Jean Brodie in a witch’s hat’ as Maggie Smith called the role of Professor McGonagall, the part that made her a household name with the kids. John Lithgow is the rather American Dumbledore.

It’s a bit hard to imagine Paapa Essiedu, a notably lightweight Hamlet, as Snape who was played with incomparable saturnine darkness by the great Alan Rickman who was a Richard III-like figure to die for.

There is also speculation about who could play the Dark Lord Voldemort with talk of Cillian Murphy (who might seem a bit fresh) or Rhys Ifans who is an actor who can do anything from the Game of Thrones prequel series House of the Dragon to playing the Fool to the late great Lear of Glenda Jackson.

David Stratton apparently said Ralph Fiennes was too cold in Oscar and Lucinda which seems wrong but coldness in an actor can be a tremendous asset. How about Benedict Cumberbatch or Hugh Laurie – or if you want the blood to go cold – you could try Clive Owen, once talked of as a James Bond but very striking in Mike Nichols’ Closer. Then again if you want glacial you could reverse every expectation and go for Hugh Grant. Think of that performance of genius in A Very English Scandal.

It’s pleasing to think that Opera Australia is now being chaired by Glyn Davis who until yesterday was the Secretary of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet. He was a legendary vice-chancellor (of Melbourne University) and he’s a notable enthusiast for the theatre of Tom Stoppard (whom he interviewed by Zoom at the 2023 Adelaide Festival). He loves the art and literature of Ancient Rome and he must be an enthusiast for the Italian conductor Andrea Battistoni who conducted at La Scala when he was a youth of 24, and who is now Opera Australia’s music director.

Meanwhile, some of us are counting the days to the MSO’s Great Mass in C Minor where Mozart throws away sections of the liturgy of the Church to convey a personal vision. You didn’t have to agree with his vision to find the late Robert Wilson an extraordinarily likeable figure. He told me he agreed to direct for the Comédie-Française because he wanted the elaborate tradition of artifice. Instead the Einstein on the Beach man said, ‘they wanted psychological realism. I ended up directing it like a radio play’. Sometimes you hear across the great divide the unmistakable voice of a true artist of the theatre whom you’ll never appreciate but you can recognise from the way he talks, self-mocking and obsessed.